This week’s Kindle Select 25 includes some very highly-rated titles, and several are priced at $2.99 or less!
Fortune’s Deadly Descent (4/5 stars, currently priced at 99 cents)
Memories of her dire past fade as Celia Hagen enjoys life in Switzerland as a best-selling author, surrounded by an extended family, her beloved Benicio, and their imaginative young son Benny. But when Benny disappears from a train during an unexpected stop in the French Provencal countryside, Celia suspects her past may not be buried after all. With Benny gone, she quickly realizes her life wasn’t nearly as idyllic as she believed. Infuriated by the unorthodox search efforts of Interpol and the French police, Celia, along with her older son Oliver, undertakes her own search, only to find that the village where Benny vanished has its own chilling history, and her interference in the case will have grave and irreversible consequences.
In the follow up to Audrey Braun’s best-selling debut, A Small Fortune, Celia discovers just how quickly everyone she loves can spiral toward a life—or death—that none of them could have seen coming.
House of Blades (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $2.99)
Simon can only watch, helpless, as his family is killed and his friends captured by enemy Travelers—men and women who can summon mystical powers from otherworldly Territories. To top it off, another young man from Simon’s village discovers that he’s a savior prophesied to destroy evil and save the realm.
Prophecy has nothing to say about Simon. He has no special powers, no magical weapons, and no guarantee that he’ll survive. But he sets off anyway, alone, to gain the power he needs to oppose the Travelers and topple their ruthless Overlord. It may not be his destiny, but Simon’s determined to rescue his fellow villagers from certain death.
Because who cares about prophecy, really?
CyberStorm (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $2.99)
Sometimes the worst storms aren’t from Mother Nature, and sometimes the worst nightmares aren’t the ones in our heads. Mike Mitchell, an average New Yorker already struggling to keep his family together, suddenly finds himself fighting just to keep them alive when an increasingly bizarre string of disasters start appearing on the world’s news networks. As the world and cyberworld come crashing down, bending perception and reality, a monster snowstorm cuts New York off from the world, turning it into a wintry tomb where nothing is what it seems…and no one can be trusted…
“As a member of the Military that does ‘cyber’ for his job, it’s refreshing to finally see a novel that shows how dangerous our transition to an interconnected infrastructure will become without proper safeguards…I couldn’t put down!” – Karic Allegra, Joint Interoperability Command, US NAVY
Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $2.99)
In the midseventies, Steve Martin exploded onto the comedy scene. By 1978 he was the biggest concert draw in the history of stand-up. In 1981 he quit forever. This book is, in his own words, the story of “why I did stand-up and why I walked away.”
Emmy and Grammy Award winner, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Martin has always been awriter. His memoir of his years in stand-up is candid, spectacularly amusing, and beautifully written.
At age ten Martin started his career at Disneyland, selling guidebooks in the newly opened theme park. In the decade that followed, he worked in the Disney magic shop and the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm, performing his first magic/comedy act a dozen times a week. The story of these years, during which he practiced and honed his craft, is moving and revelatory. The dedication to excellence and innovation is formed at an astonishingly early age and never wavers or wanes.
Martin illuminates the sacrifice, discipline, and originality that made him an icon and informs his work to this day. To be this good, to perform so frequently, was isolating and lonely. It took Martin decades to reconnect with his parents and sister, and he tells that story with great tenderness. Martin also paints a portrait of his times — the era of free love and protests against the war in Vietnam, the heady irreverence of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the late sixties, and the transformative new voice of Saturday Night Live in the seventies.
Throughout the text, Martin has placed photographs, many never seen before. Born Standing Up is a superb testament to the sheer tenacity, focus, and daring of one of the greatest and most iconoclastic comedians of all time.
Click here to browse the full list of this week’s Kindle Select 25.