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Friday, December 31st
“A Dog Named Slugger” by Leigh Brill
Price: $0.00 expired
A true story about a woman with cerebral palsy, and how her bond with a helper dog enabled her to come to terms with the disease and enjoy life. Amazon reviewers say it’s a fast read, inspirational, warm, and “a must for anyone who loves animals and works with them.” Read the first chapter online.
Thursday, December 30th
“The Existential Joss Whedon” J. Michael Richardson and J. Douglas Rabb
Price: $2.99 expired
In every generation there is a slayer, and also an academic who writes a lengthy treatise on the slayer’s relevance to culture, philosophy, cooking, etc. This one also includes Whedon’s non-Buffy TV series, and examines them all from an existentialist perspective. I like these lines from the description: “Chapters cover such topics as Russian existentialism and vampire slayage; moral choices; ethics; Faith and bad faith.”
Wednesday, December 29th
“Everything Is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer
Price: $2.99 expired
A young man named after the author sets off through the Ukraine to look for a woman from his grandfather’s past. He’s guided by a Ukrainian translator with a stunningly bad grasp of English who comically narrates most of the novel. Foer was 25 when the book was first published in 2002, and it was universally praised. Well, except by someone named Melinda in the reader reviews. Read the first chapter online.
Tuesday, December 28th
“Heidegger’s Glasses” by Thaisa Frank
Price: $0.00
At the end of World War II, in an underground Nazi compound built to resemble a village, a group of prisoners called the Scribes are housed and forced to answer letters to the dead as part of a desperate occult “insurance” plan. When they’re commanded to answer a letter from philosopher Martin Heidegger to his friend who was killed at Auschwitz, things begin to fall apart. Read the first chapter online.
Monday, December 27th
“The Score” by Richard Stark
Price: $2.99 expired
In book 5 of Richard Stark’s classic noir crime novels from the 1960s, professional thief Parker teams up with a group of 11 con artists to rob an entire town in North Dakota. Read the first chapter online.
Friday, December 24th
“Watchlist” by Jeffery Deaver and 20 other thriller writers
Price: $0.00 expired
“Watchlist is a unique collaboration by twenty-one of the world’s greatest thriller writers including Lee Child, Joseph Finder, David Hewson, S.J. Rozan, Lisa Scottoline, and Jeffery Deaver, who conceived the characters and set the plot in motion; In turn, the other authors each wrote a chapter and Deaver then completed what he started, bringing each novel to its startling conclusion.” Read the first chapter online.
Thursday, December 23rd
“Hollywood Station: A Novel” by Joseph Wambaugh
Price: $2.99
“For a cop, a night on the job means killing time and trying not to get killed. If you’re in Hollywood Division, it also means dealing with some of the most desperate criminals anywhere. Now the violent robbery of a jewelry store quickly connects to a Russian nightclub and an undercover operation gone wrong, and the sergeant they call the Oracle and his squad of quirky cops have to make sense of it all.” Read the first chapter online.
Wednesday, December 22nd
“Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel” by Michio Kaku
Price: $1.99
Physics professor Michio Kaku takes a look at the science of sci-fi: are concepts like teleportation, time travel, force fields, telepathy, and parallel universes theoretically possible given our understanding of the universe? Most readers seem to love it, although there are a few complaints that it’s too light on actual science. Read the first chapter online.
Tuesday, December 21st
“Child 44″ by Tom Rob Smith
Price: $2.99
A serial killer is at work in Stalin’s Soviet Union, but such a murderer is so ideologically repellent to the state that officially he doesn’t exist. It’s up to MGB officer Leo Demidov–a former war hero now demoted and targeted by his enemies–to find and stop the killer, without being labeled a traitor to the country he’s sworn to protect. Read the first chapter online.
Monday, December 20th
“The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda : Book One)” by Richard Phillips
Price: $0.99
“In Los Alamos, New Mexico, the quiet scientific community spawned by the Manhattan Project comes face to face with a technological breakthrough for which the world is completely unprepared. As a special team of operatives struggles to stop the project codenamed Rho while containment is still possible, what it means to be human is about to change–forever.” Unusually high raves for action and readability in the reader reviews. Read the first chapter online.
Friday, December 17th
“How to Drink” by Victoria Moore
Price: $0.00 expired
“Here are recipes for mint juleps in the spring, sloe gin in the autumn, hot buttered rum in the winter, and year-round showstoppers including the world’s best gin and tonic.” Or as I like to call it, “The most important book you’ll read this holiday season.”
Thursday, December 16th
“The Boxcar Children” by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Price: $1.99
“Henry, Jessie, Violet and Benny, four orphaned brothers and sisters, suddenly appear in a small town. No one knows who these young wanderers are or where they have come from. Frightened to live with a grandfather they have never met, the children make a home for themselves in an abandoned red boxcar they discover in the woods–until Violet gets too sick for her brothers and sister to care for her.” Read the first chapter online.
Wednesday, December 15th (Bonus Book!)
“The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook Presents: A Magical Christmas Menu” by Dinah Bucholz
Price: $0.00
Really a collection of traditional British recipes for things like treacle tarts, shepherd’s pie, and the queen’s fanny. (I made up that last one. Also I’m American, so I claim full innocence regarding British vulgar slang.) You probably won’t find anything unique to Rowling’s books due to legal issues, but you might find dishes that are at least Potter-like.
Wednesday, December 15th
“Lockdown” by Alexander Gordon Smith
Price: $1.99
In this first book of a young adult series, 14-year-old Alex Sawyer finds himself framed for a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to a secret underground prison–where he discovers many of the other teenage inmates are also innocent, and fodder for disturbing secret experiments. Sawyer and his cellmate must find a way past surgically enhanced captors and their skinless guard dogs if they ever want to expose the truth behind Furnace Penitentiary. Read the first chapter online.
Tuesday, December 14th
“The Zero Game” by Brad Meltzer
Price: $1.99
“Matthew Mercer and Harris Sandler are best friends and senior staffers to well-respected congressmen. But after a decade in Washington, they’re disillusioned and bored. Then one of them finds out about the clandestine Zero Game. It starts out as good fun, but when someone close to them ends up dead, Harris and Matthew realize the game is far more sinister than they ever imagined–and that they’re about to be the game’s next victims.” Read the first chapter online.
Monday, December 13th
“Blood of the Wicked” by Leighton Gage
Price: $0.00 expired
“In a remote Brazilian town, a bishop arrives by helicopter to consecrate a new church and is assassinated. Mario Silva, chief inspector for criminal matters of the federal police of Brazil, is dispatched to the interior to find the killer. The pope himself has called Brazil’s president; the pressure is on Silva to perform. Silva and his nephew Hector must battle the state police, a corrupt judiciary, criminals who prey on street kids, the warring factions of the Landless League, the big landowners, and the church itself, in order to solve the bishop’s murder and several that follow.”
Friday, December 10th
“dreamer’s cat” by Stephen Leather
Price: $0.99 $3.99
In this “science fiction murder mystery” set in the near future, a dreamer-for-hire–someone who is paid to provide subconscious entertainment to the public–has to track down who is killing other Dreamers before he becomes the next victim. But to do that he has to enter the victims’ virtual worlds, where anything goes. Read the first chapter online. The author has two other 99 cent offerings: a serial-killer novella called “the basement”
Thursday, December 9th
“Need” by Carrie Jones
Price: $1.99
A young adult fix for Twilight addicts. “Zara collects phobias the way other high school girls collect lipsticks. Mom’s sent her to live with her grandmother in cold and sleepy Maine. The man she sees everywhere – the tall creepy guy who points at her from the side of the road – yeh, he’s not a figment of her imagination. Maine’s got a whole assortment of unbelievable creatures, like pixies and were-people. And they seem to need something from Zara.” Read the first chapter online.
Wednesday, December 8th
“Flyboys” by James Bradley
Price: $1.99
“A true story of eight young American airmen who were shot down, captured by Japanese troops and taken prisoner during World War II. On the island of Chichi Jima those young men would face the ultimate test. Their story–a tale of courage and daring, of war and of death, of men and of hope–will make you proud, and it will break your heart.” Caution: reader reviews are all over the place and seem partly determined by political leanings. Read the first chapter online.
Tuesday, December 7th
“Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder” by Joanne Fluke
Price: $0.88 $2.99
“Hannah Swenson already has her hands full trying to dodge her mother’s attempts to marry her off while running The Cookie Jar, Lake Eden, Minnesota’s most popular bakery. But once Ron LaSalle, the beloved delivery man from the Cozy Cow Dairy, is found murdered behind her bakery with Hannah’s famous Chocolate Chip Crunchies scattered around him, her life just can’t get any worse. Determined not to let her cookies get a bad reputation, she sets out to track down a killer.”
Monday, December 6th
“Burned Alive” by Souad
Price: $1.99
“A 17-year-old girl from Jordan beats the odds and lives to tell the tale of her family’s attempt to kill her after she shames them by becoming pregnant.” Read the first chapter online. * * If true stories about an attempted honor killing isn’t your cup of tea, how about a free history of popular Christmas songs
Friday, December 3rd
“The Hangman’s Daughter” by Oliver Potzsch and Lee Chadeayne
Price: $0.99 $3.99
“Germany, 1660: When a dying boy is pulled from the river with a mark crudely tattooed on his shoulder, hangman Jakob Kuisl is called upon to investigate whether witchcraft is at play in his small Bavarian town. Whispers and dark memories of witch trials and the women burned at the stake just seventy years earlier still haunt the streets of Schongau.”
Thursday, December 2nd
“Stupid Christmas” by Leland Gregory
Price: $0.00 expired
“From absurd 911 calls to presidential philosophizing and foolish felons, Leland Gregory generates the best laughs by exposing the worst of human nature. Following up his New York Times best-selling Stupid American History, Gregory sets his sights on the holidays as he exposes mind-numbing mistletoe maladies.” Read the first chapter online.
Wednesday, December 1st
“The Ritual Bath” by Faye Kellerman
Price: $0.99
“The quiet, ordered world of a yeshiva in the California hills is shattered when a woman is brutally raped as she returns from the mikvah, the bathhouse where women perform their cleansing ritual. Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD has never heard anything like it. And although most of the community refuses to talk to him, Rina Lazarus, the only witness, does, steering him through the maze of confusing religious laws that thwart his investigation at every turn.” Read the first chapter online.
