Check out Amazon’s $1.99 Memorial Day Weekend Sale on Kindle Books! The sale includes such titles as:
The Dragon Business (4/5 stars)
King Cullin may be known as “the Dragon Slayer,” but he fears his son’s legacy will be as “King Maurice Who Speaks with Proper Grammar.” The boy keeps his nose buried in parchments, starry-eyed at the idea of noble knights and eager to hand royal gold to any con man hawking a unicorn horn. Tonight, though, Cullin will educate the prince in the truth behind minstrels’ silly songs of glory…
Long ago, in a kingdom, well, not that far from here really, young Cullin traveled the countryside as squire to brave Sir Dalbry, along with Dalbry’s trusted sidekick Reeger, selling dragon-protection services to every kingdom with a coffer. There were no dragons, of course, but with a collection of severed alligator heads and a willingness to play dirty, the trio of con men was crushing the competition. Then along came Princess Affonyl.
Tomboyish and with a head for alchemy, Affonyl faked a dragon of her own, escaped her arranged marriage, and threw in with Cullin and company. But with her father sending a crew of do-gooder knights to find her, the dragon business just got cutthroat.
Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century (4/5 stars)
1981. Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand are sworn in as presidents of the Unites States and France, respectively. The tension due to Mitterrand’s French Communist support, however, is immediately defused when he gives Reagan the Farewell Dossier, a file he would later call “one of the greatest spy cases of the twentieth century.”
Vladimir Ippolitovitch Vetrov, a promising technical student, joins the KGB to work as a spy. Following a couple of murky incidents, however, Vetrov is removed from the field and placed at a desk as an analyst. Soon, burdened by a troubled marriage and frustrated at a flailing career, Vetrov turns to alcohol. Desperate and needing redemption, he offers his services to the DST. Thus Agent Farewell is born. He uses his post within the KGB to steal and photocopy files of the USSR’s plans for the West—all under Brezhnev’s nose.
Probing further into Vetrov’s psychological profile than ever before, Kostin and Raynaud provide groundbreaking insight into the man whose life helped hasten the fall of the Soviet Regime.
The Proving Ground (4.5/5 stars)
In this 10th Anniversary edition, with a new afterword from the author, G. Bruce Knecht tells the harrowing story of a world-renowned sailing race gone fatally bad.
On December 26, 1998, 115 sailboats crossed the starting line of the famous Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. The 630-nautical-mile contest is among the most difficult races in the world, a test of strength and endurance like few others. But no one could have foreseen the tragedy that would befall the competitors, who sailed into a massive storm that tore apart the fleet with hurricane-force winds and eighty-foot waves. What began as a race for glory rapidly became a fight for survival. In this gripping insider’s account, award-winning writer G. Bruce Knecht focuses on three yachts and their crews, weaving together an extraordinary story with vivid detail, outsized personalities, and high drama. Most importantly, he offers a glimpse into how people with very different backgrounds responded to something bigger than they were—and how it changed them forever. Hailed as “harrowing” by the New York Times, “pulse-pounding” by People magazine, and “the Perfect Storm of blue-water sailboat racing” by Walter Cronkite, The Proving Ground is a true-to-life adventure tale as thrilling as any work of fiction.
Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here – 87th Precinct, Ed McBain (4.5/5 stars)
At midnight, one day dies as another comes to life. For the men of the 87th Precinct, they all bleed together in a never-ending cycle of crime and punishment. But every now and then, a day stands out as more unusual than the others. This is one of those days.
Carella and Hawes investigate a murder; Kling delves into a store-front church bombing; Meyer checks out a house haunted by larcenous ghosts; Willis and Genero look into a naked hippie’s four-story death fall; Delgado takes an assault case in the Puerto Rican barrio; and Kapek hunts a man and woman mugging team. But when a gunman kills a grocer and shoots Parker twice, the rules of the game quickly change. With Parker’s life hanging in the balance, the detectives of the 87th will stop at nothing to get their man.
For the first time, bestselling author Ed McBain puts all of his characters into one supercharged installment of the 87th Precinct series. Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here! is a taut, relentless thriller that illustrates his unmatched ability to weave multiple story threads into one ferociously intense novel.
Click here to browse the full listings of Amazon’s $1.99 Memorial Day Sale, and remember: this sale ends at 11:59:59pm PST on Monday, 5/26/14, so act fast to get the books you want while they’re on sale!