Shirley Kennedy tops today’s Buffet with The Irish Upstart, a historical romance with humor, charm, and greed woven into a heartbreaking family story. This book was originally published as a Signet paperback in 2001.
Shirley was born and raised in Fresno, California, then lived in Canada for many years, enjoying skiing and riding horses, and graduating from the University of Calgary, Alberta, with a B.S. in Computer Science. She worked for several years as a computer programmer/analyst, but her true passion was always writing. In the 1990s she took a big risk and decided to devote herself to writing full-time, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions she ever made. Now, after writing and publishing several traditional Regencies, Shirley has switched genres, and is currently working on a western romance as well as a longer Regency historical. Today Shirley lives in Las Vegas and belongs to the Las Vegas chapter of Romance Writers of America.
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The Irish Upstart
Historical Fiction > Regency
Author: Shirley Kennedy
County Clare, Ireland, 1816 —
Evleen O’Fallon is shocked when handsome Lord Thomas Linberry appears at her family’s humble cottage overlooking Galway Bay. Just arrived from England, he bears the news that Evleen’s young half brother Patrick—born to the dissolute Englishman who stole her mother’s heart and spent her fortune—is the heir to a vast estate. Patrick’s mother won’t let him go unless Evleen accompanies him to England with Lord Thomas. Thus begins Evleen’s harrowing journey from her beloved Ireland to England, where she finds herself an outcast in London’s snobbish high society.
The author’s meticulous research of Ireland in the 19th century brings authenticity to the story. Thomas and Evleen’s romance begins under the Whispering Arch at the ancient ruins of Clonmacnoise. It survives a nightmare journey across the Irish Sea on The Countess of Liverpool. They come from different worlds. Will their love survive?
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Place Your Betts (The Marilyns)
Romantic Comedy
Author: Katie Graykowski
Betts Monroe is a country music rags-to-riches story. As the daughter of the town slut, she clawed her way up from the bars of Bourbon Street to the Country Music Hall of Fame. She’s America’s sweetheart, darling of the media, and a multi-platinum star. But she has a secret. At the age of sixteen, she had a baby and gave him up for adoption because her boyfriend wasn’t ready for fatherhood. Now she finds out that her precious baby boy has been living with his father from day one.
Gabe Swanson is a Texas cattle baron riches-to-rags story. As the only son of the town’s most prominent family, it was a huge blow when his father lost the family fortune in a ponzi scheme. Now, Gabe is land rich and cash poor. But he has his son and family is all that matters.
When Betts moves back to the small town that shunned her, all hell breaks loose. She wants her son. Can Betts and Gabe leave their past in the rear view mirror so they can be a family?
Lovers at Heart (Love in Bloom: The Bradens, Book 1)
Contemporary Romance
Author: Melissa Foster
Handsome, wealthy resort owner Treat Braden is used to getting what he wants. When Max Armstrong walked into his life six months earlier, he saw right through the efficient and capable façade she wore like a shield, to the sweet, sensual woman who lay beneath. She sparked an unfamiliar desire in him for more than a one-night stand, leaving his heart reeling and his blood boiling. But one mistake caused her to turn away, and now, after six months of longing for the one woman he cannot have, he’s going home to try to forget her all together.
Max Armstrong has a successful career, a comfortable lifestyle, and she’s never needed a man to help her find her way–until Treat Braden caught her attention at a wedding in Nassau, causing a surge of emotions too reminiscent of the painful past she’d spent years trying to forget. Max will do anything to avoid reliving that pain–including forgoing her toe-curling, heart-pounding desire for Treat.
When a chance encounter turns into a night of intense passion, Treat realizes that the mistake he made six months earlier may cause him to lose Max completely. He will do everything within his power to win her heart forever–and Max is forced to face her hurtful past head on for the man she cannot help but love.
Chasing The Storm (Rygg & Marin Thrillers)
International Mystery & Crime
Author: Martin Molsted
While in Hamburg, lawyer and former elite soldier, Torgrim Rygg, witnesses the assassination attempt on Marko Marin, a Russian journalist investigating the disappearance of a ship ostensibly carrying timber bound for Algiers. He gets drawn into a world of conspiracies, cover-ups and the relentless search for a missing ship. Disenchanted with his mundane office-life he agrees to help Mr. Marin, and together with Marin’s girlfriend, Lena, and their hacker, Sasha, he sets out on a journey to discover the truth about the missing ship.
Their truth seeking kicks off a series of life-threatening events and a relentless race against time to foil whoever is behind the disappearance of the ship, The Alpensturm. Their revelation puts not only their own lives at risk but the safety of the whole world …
The King of Clayfield
Literature & Fiction > Horror
Author: Shane Gregory
On a cold February day in the small town of Clayfield, Kentucky, an unsuspecting and unprepared museum director finds himself in the middle of hell on Earth. A pandemic is spreading around the globe, and it’s turning most of the residents of Clayfield into murderous zombies. Having no safe haven to which he can flee, the director decides to stick it out near his hometown and wait for the government to send help.
But the disease and those infected are not his only concerns. He must also contend with armed gangs, strife within his group, his own lack of skills… and his conscience.
There are tough decisions to be made if he is to survive. But if he is smart–and a little lucky–he can do more than survive; he can live like a king.
Eden’s Hammer (Distant Eden)
Science Fiction > Post-Apocalyptic
Author: Lloyd Tackitt
It’s three years after the electrical grid was obliterated by a huge coronal mass ejection, and ninety-seven percent of America’s population died.
Adrian’s war with the mountain cannibals is over and his uncle has called him home with chilling news. Something is going to annihiliate Adrian’s home village, Fort Brazos. Roman won’t say more than that over the radio. It takes Adrian three weeks to get home and find out what the coming threat is, and what he can do about it. Eden’s Hammer begins with his arrival.
BODIES: Book #1: Staged Fright
Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Author: Sameer Ketkar
Diseased corpse at 5-star hotel? Check. Bioterror connection and radical Islamist YouTube videos? Check. Potential outbreak, citywide lockdown, and CDC race to find a treatment? Check. Three members of the same investigative team getting into a threesome and deciding to turn it into an ongoing relationship? Um…….check!
Larkin and Tigh, the matriarch and patriarch, respectively, head up the C.D.C.’s Crisis Response Team. But when a bioterror attack in their hometown forces them to team up with a Homeland Security agent named Corban Banks, sparks begin to fly! In more ways than one!
Fresh Temptation (Barboza Brothers)
Contemporary Romance
Author: Reeni Austin
Victor Barboza is a man who has everything but a good woman.
Cara Green has a young son, three part-time jobs, and a few extra pounds.
Their worlds collide as Cara serves Victor at an upscale party in Manhattan, upsetting Victor’s ex-fiancee, Alexis, in the process.
Victor pursues Cara, but Cara is not sure of his intentions: Is he using her to make Alexis jealous? Does he just want her for sex? Or is love Victor’s true aim?
The Last Day in the Life of Jillian (The Last Days)
Horror > Occult
Author: Julie Cooper Brown
Jillian and Evan are trapped and Evan is ill. Jillian recalls the events that have led to their demise, as well as documenting the stages of Evan’s infection as he changes into a being she used to love to be afraid of.
TODAY’S BARGAINS……………What’s this?
Nightfall
Romance > Mystery & Suspense
Author: Anne Stuart
Regularly $9.99, Today $1.99
This is my fate . . . to die for unspeakable crimes. All I ask is that a stranger give herself to me and to my secrets.
Richard Tiernan has been sentenced to death. With an ulterior motive and a heart full of dark truths, he agrees to tell all to an ailing writer whose greed and ambition are so strong that he will even give his own daughter to Richard in return for one last Pulitzer-winning story.
I want Cassidy Roarke. I need her. But she has to prove she’s worthy. That she can be trusted.
Cassidy’s spent her life struggling to earn her father’s respect and love. Now his health is failing, and her feelings for him are even more complex. Loyalty is a sacrifice. Daughters can be broken by their fathers. She has to help when he calls. He’s bailed Richard Tiernan out of prison just long enough to coax the shocking facts out of him. What happened that night? What did Tiernan really do to his family?
Her father will sell his soul to the Devil before he dies. So be it.
Richard Tiernan may take them both to Hell.
The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
History > Military > World War II
Author: Robert M. Edsel, Bret Witter
Regularly $9.99, Today $2.99
At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: “degenerate” works he despised.
In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Momuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.
Focusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world’s great art from the Nazis.
The Scribe: Irin Chronicles Book One
Fantasy > Paranormal & Urban
Author: Elizabeth Hunter
Regularly $4.99, Today $1.99
Hidden at the crossroads of the world, an ancient race battles to protect humanity, even as it dies from within.
Ava Matheson came to Istanbul looking for answers, but others came looking for her. A reckless warrior guards her steps, but will Malachi’s own past blind him to the truth of who Ava might be? While ancient forces gather around them, both Ava and Malachi search for answers.
Whispering voices. Deadly touch. Their passion should be impossible… or it could be the only thing that will keep them alive.
Just Kids
Biographies & Memoirs >Entertainers
Author: Patti Smith
Regularly $9.99, Today $1.99
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren’t always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late ’60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices–or the world was ready to hear them. Lovers first and then friends as Mapplethorpe discovered he was gay, they divided their dimes between art supplies and Coney Island hot dogs. Mapplethorpe was quicker to find his metier, with a Polaroid and then a Hasselblad, but Smith was the first to fame, transformed, to her friend’s delight, from a poet into a rock star. (Mapplethorpe soon became famous too–and notorious–before his death from AIDS in 1989.) Smith’s memoir of their friendship, Just Kids, is tender and artful, open-eyed but surprisingly decorous, with the oracular style familiar from her anthems like “Because the Night,” “Gloria,” and “Dancing Barefoot” balanced by her powers of observation and memory for everyday details like the price of automat sandwiches and the shabby, welcoming fellow bohemians of the Chelsea Hotel, among whose ranks these baby Rimbauds found their way. –Tom Nissley
Ham On Rye
Literary Fiction > Classics
Author: Charles Bukowski
Regularly $9.99, Today $1.99
In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library’s collection of D. H. Lawrence,Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast’s coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.
… See the rest of today’s Editor’s Picks here on page 2