She’s worked at more jobs than she can remember, including veterinarian, childbirth educator, freelance copyeditor, camp counselor, court-appointed advocate for abused and neglected children, church council leader, community theater diva, hospital volunteer, mother of three, wife, laundress, and housekeeper (although she admits she never quite got the hang of that last one).
Edie Claire is also a playwright and author of several mystery, romantic-suspense and young-adult novels. The lady thrives on variety. To put it another way, she’s easily bored.
One thing for sure, Edie writes nice, cozy mysteries. You won’t find much vulgarity here. No gore or horror, no explicit bedroom scenes. All of the crimes in her books happen off the page. She figures there’s enough negativity and depressing stuff in real life, so why burden her readers with more of it?
She started writing her first book, Never Buried, in the late 1990s, and the project began as a back-of-the-envelope affair. At first, she simply wanted to find out if she could write a whole book. Edie decided to make it a spooky romance tale set in the real-life, quaint Pittsburgh borough where she first practiced as a small-animal vet.
“About halfway through, I realized my romance book had no man in it, so I decided I’d better make it a mystery instead,” Edie told me yesterday.
She finished. Then she realized the book was way too short. So she decided to go back and add a huge plot twist. That forced her to backtrack and completely rewrite everything she already had.
“It’s not a process any writer should ever copy, but I had fun doing it, and I was over the moon when I was offered a three-book contract from Penguin,” she said.
Never Buried launched Edie’s “Leigh Koslow” mystery series, and it’s the icing on today’s Buffet. Most readers agree that it’s a funny, fast-paced, smart and unusual mystery.
After that first book, Edie wrote four more in the series, then switched publishers to write two romantic-suspense novels, both of them Top Picks in Romantic Times. But she grew frustrated for the next several years as the market stalled for her kind of book. It was a long drought. She was afraid she’d never get another book contract, and she stopped writing.
The lull ended with a bang a couple of years ago, as eBooks began revolutionizing the business. Edie got back to work, re-editing and reformatting all her previous books. By then, the rights had reverted to her, and she was free to republish them independently. So with a deep, hopeful breath, she commissioned brand-new cover artwork for each one, uploaded them to Kindle and Nook, and began promoting her books again. When she saw the response, she was floored.
“I was absolutely stunned,” Edie told me. “People started finding and reading Never Buried who had never seen the series when it was in print, and the books started taking off all over again.” Today her Kindle royalties are rolling in, and she’s got new paperback versions of her books for sale.
With readers clamoring for still more, Edie started writing again last year, and after a full 10-year hiatus, released #6 in her mystery series, Never Con a Corgi. The book has struck a sweet-sounding chord of popularity, critical acclaim, and strong sales. Quite literally, the birth of Edie’s new book capped an immaculate ten-year pregnancy, and thank goodness for the happy ending.
Yes, the eBook revolution has given Edie and her stories a whole new lease on life. “I am back to being a full-time novelist, my favorite job of all,” she said. “As long as people keep reading, I intend to keep writing.”
Never Buried (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series, Book 1)
Mystery
Author: Edie Claire
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The truth about what happened in 1949 went to Paul Fischer’s grave… Too bad his body didn’t!
Advertising copywriter Leigh Koslow doesn’t pack heat–just a few extra pounds. And she doesn’t go looking for trouble. When she moved into her cousin Cara’s refurbished Victorian house, she wasn’t planning on discovering a corpse–certainly not one that had been embalmed ten years before. But as anyone in the small Pittsburgh borough of Avalon could tell her, her cousin’s house has a history attached. A history dating back to two mysterious deaths in the summer of 1949.
Someone wants Leigh and Cara out of the house–someone who has something to hide. But that someone doesn’t know Leigh’s impetuous cousin, and when Cara digs her heels in, Leigh looks to her old college chum, local policewoman Maura Polanski, for help. But the answers the trio find only point to more questions. Were the scandalous deaths of fifty years ago really an accident and a suicide? Or were they murder?
The nearer the women get to the truth, the more desperate someone becomes. Because some secrets are better off kept. Especially when they hit close to home!
Laughter Really Is The Best Medicine: America’s Funniest Jokes, Stories, and Cartoons
Humor & Entertainment
Author: Editors of Reader’s Digest
This collection of laugh-out-loud jokes, one-liners, and other lighthearted glimpses of life-drawn from Reader’s Digest magazine’s most popular humor columns-is sure to tickle the funny bone. Packed with more than 1,000 jokes, anecdotes, cartoons, quotes, and stories contributed by professional comedians, joke writers, and readers of the magazine, this side-splitting compilation pokes fun at the facts and foibles of daily routines, illustrating that life is often funnier than fiction
Did you hear about the Broadway actor who broke through the floorboards? He was just going through a stage What did the ill comic say in the hospital? “I’m here…all weak!”
Charles Dickens walks into a bar and orders a martini. The bartender asks, “Olive or twist?”
Posted in a dental office: “Be kind to your dentist. He has fillings too.”
“The main advantage of being famous is that when you bore people at dinner parties, they think it is their fault.” -Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize, 1973
As Groucho Marx once said, “A laugh is like an aspirin, only it works twice as fast.”
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Sword Bearer (Return of the Dragons)
Fantasy
Author: Teddy Jacobs
Locked in his room in the castle, young Anders yearns for adventure. Until the day he opens a magic portal and a girl bursts into his locked room with a chemical warlock hot on her trail.
And adventure finds him — an adventure full of danger, full of blood, fire, demons and evil. To face it, he’ll need the sword given him by his blademaster, need the ancient words his grandfather gave him on his deathbed. Need the song that runs in his own blood, in his veins.
A sword will be reforged, magic words discovered, battles fought, friends made and lost, secrets revealed. And blood will be spilled. But will blade, word and blood be enough?
The Cartel
Contemporary Fiction
Author: A.K. Alexander
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What began as an innocent love affair for one young woman, Marta Peña, in Costa Careyes, Mexico in 1969, sets in motion a series of events that spans the next thirty years. This is the story of South American drug lords Antonio Espinoza and Javier Rodriguez, and their violent quest for power. In a sweeping family saga, we meet the women who love them and the children they vow to protect at any cost. With a complex web of interconnected families, this gritty novel delves into the lives of a power hungry clan, following the rise of their business, the destructive path of their torrid and erotic love affairs, and the struggle to balance intense greed with devout family loyalty. Strong women face tragedies that test their will and their commitment to the men they passionately desire. As young girls grow into women, their traumatic pasts will drive their actions and force them to make gut-wrenching decisions. With murder, drug trafficking, dirty politics, illegal gambling, prostitution, obsessive love affairs, and family strife, The Cartel is a whirlwind in the vein of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.
The Guestbook
Advice & How-to
Author: Andrea Hurst
Everyone remembers their first love…
but sometimes it’s the second love that lasts…
Fleeing her picture-perfect marriage among the privileged set of Brentwood and the wreckage of a failed marriage, Lily Parkins decides to move to the only place that still holds happy memories, her grandmother’s old farmhouse. The lush and majestic setting of the Pacific Northwest calls to her and offers a place of refuge and perhaps renewal. Her grandmother has passed away, leaving the Madrona Island Bed & Breakfast Inn to Lily.
Left with only an old guestbook as her guide–a curious book full of letters, recipes, and glimpses into her family history–Lily is determined to embrace her newfound independence and recreate herself, one page at a time.
No Good Deed: Book One of the Mark Taylor Series
Contemporary Fiction
Author: M.P. McDonald
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Mark Taylor discovers first hand that no good deed goes unpunished when the old camera he found during a freelance job in an Afghanistan bazaar gives him more than great photos. It triggers dreams of disasters. Tragedies that happen exactly as he envisions them. He learns that not only can he see the future, he can change it. Then the unthinkable happened and everyone ignored his frantic warnings. Thousands die. Suddenly, the Feds are pounding on his door and the name they have for Taylor isn’t urban hero. It’s enemy combatant. And, it means they can do anything they want to him. Anything at all.
My Temporary Life (My Temporary Life Trilogy)
Drama
Author: Martin Crosbie
Malcolm Wilson learned that everything is always temporary. Growing up, he’s raised by a promiscuous mother who can’t stay out of trouble, his best friend is a thirteen-year-old alcoholic, and the masters at his tough Scottish school are always raising their canes in his direction. When he becomes an adult, he escapes, and chooses the safe route, watching the rest of the world from a distance. Everything changes the day he meets the beautiful, alluring, green-haired Heather, and when he learns of Heather’s own abusive childhood and the horrific secret she’s been carrying, Malcolm makes a decision-this time he’s not backing down, whatever the cost.
War of the Fae: Book 1 (The Changelings)
Fantasy
Author: Elle Casey
Jayne Sparks, a potty-mouthed, rebellious seventeen-year-old and her best friend, shy and bookish Tony Green, have a pretty typical high school existence, until several seemingly unrelated incidents converge, causing a cascade of events that change their lives forever. Jayne and Tony, together with a group of runaway teens, are hijacked and sent into a forest, where nothing and no one are as they seem. Who will emerge triumphant? And what will they be when they do?
The Shoot
Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Author: Timothy Frost
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Kate Robinson, twenty-two and cheerfully single, lands a dream assignment: production assistant for a film shoot on the Caribbean hideaway of St. Saviour’s. With her eye for detail and flair for organizing everyone, Kate’s in her element. But the beautiful star of the shoot, Jasmine, takes an instant dislike to her … dark forces are at work on the island … and a storm is brewing in the Atlantic. When members of her crew start to die, and she is implicated, Kate discovers that filming a TV commercial in the Tropics can actually be murder.
Silver Justice
Action & Adventure
Author: Russell Blake
Manhattan. A ruthless serial killer is butchering financial industry high rollers. FBI Special Agent Silver Cassidy, the head of a task force that’s on a collision course with disaster, finds herself fighting impossible odds to stop the murderer before he can kill again.
Struggling to balance the hunt for a savage predator with the challenges of being a single parent, Silver finds herself thrust into a nightmare of brutality that will demand every ounce of determination she possesses to survive.
What the Heart Wants (Soulmate Series: Book One)
Horror
Author: Kelli McCracken
Dylan McBride is tired of his rock star lifestyle. Between the nosy press and crazed fans, all he wants is to be left alone…and find the angel who’s been plaguing his dreams for months. Maybe longer. When he meets Heaven Lewis, his world is turned upside down. Not only is she the girl from his dreams, he notices he can sense her emotions at any place and time.
Cooking the Books: A Sloane Templeton Mystery
Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Author: Bonnie S. Calhoun
After her mother dies from a heart attack, Sloane Templeton goes from Cyber Crimes Unit to bookstore owner before she can blink. She also “inherits” a half-batty store manager; a strange bunch of little old people from the neighborhood who meet at the store once a week, but never read books, called the Granny Oakleys Book Club; and Aunt Verline, who fancies herself an Iron Chef when in reality you need a cast iron stomach to partake of her culinary disasters. And with a group like this you should never ask, “What else can go wrong?”
A lot! Sloane begins to receive cyber threats. While Sloane uses her computer forensic skills to uncover the source of the threats, it is discovered someone is out to kill her. Can her life get more crazy?
The Riddler’s Gift: First Tale of the Lifesong (The Tale of the Lifesong)
Epic Fantasy
Author: Greg Hamerton
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A shadow steals across Eyri. One by one, the Lightgifters are snuffed out. When darkness strikes her family, Tabitha receives a dangerous legacy. Soon the Riddler walks beside her, but is he on her side?
The more she searches for answers, the further into treachery she is led. The more she tries to flee, the harder she is hunted. And the more she sings the ancient Lifesong, the more the world begins to change.
Can she grasp her gift before the darkness captures the last of the light?
The Last Honest Seamstress
Historical Fiction
Author: Gina Robinson
Seattle, 1889. Too many rough, lonely men, too few respectable women;
Brothels full of prostitutes who call themselves seamstresses;
Two sewing machines;
One real seamstress who desperately needs a husband–of convenience
And one man who will do anything to win her love…
Even make a dangerous deal with Seattle’s most notorious madam.
Untitled
Literary Fiction
Author: Jackie Chanel
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For Aiden, music is more than a sound. It’s food. It’s air. It’s passion. It’s his escape. But does music make the man or does the man make the music?
In the industry fighting to make his kind of music…what will the music make him become?
Beneath the Willow (Jesse & Sarah)
Contemporary Fiction
Author: Jeremy Asher
Sarah Ramsey, a business owner in the Windy City, is struggling to keep everything together through a difficult divorce. Her husband, a once brilliant attorney, is about to lose his career along with his marriage and is set on making Sarah’s life just as miserable as his.
When Jesse and his fiancée, Kate, walk into a local floral shop to pick out the flowers for their upcoming wedding, Jesse runs into the only other woman he has ever loved, Sarah. Their brief encounter sets off a series of catastrophic events as Sarah reveals a secret that will test the foundations of their lives, leaving them with one certainty…life will never be the same for either of them.
Q – A Thriller
Action & Adventure
Author: K D George
How far would you go to rescue your lover? Would you go to hell on earth? Ex-soldier Felix Chapman embarks on an audacious attempt to rescue his wife after her abduction in a vicious modern day piracy attack off West Africa. She is lost in a brutal anarchic country ruled by warring tribes. There are no laws, no police, no diplomatic treaties and no hope…
100 Unfortunate Days
Horror
Author: Penelope Crowe
If you stumbled upon the diary of a stranger, you might be compelled to read. If you stumbled upon the diary of a madwoman–how could you turn away?
Creating Space: The Case for Everyday Creativity
Advice & How-to
Author: Ed Cyzewski
Creativity is a gift everyone has been given to share, but doubt, discouragement, and distractions hinder the ability of many to pursue their creative passions. Creating Space advocates for the creative gifts in every person, arguing that…
- Creativity is not a mistake.
- Creativity can be developed.
- Creativity is a vitally important gift for others.
This brief manifesto on creativity is for everyone. Whether you doodle, sing in the shower, knit scarves, or scribble poems, Creating Space will encourage you to make space in your life in order to fulfill your creative calling, using your gifts to their fullest extent.
Keys to the Coven (Demonic Intervention Series)
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Author: Vicky Loebel
To become a demon, you must die in complete and utter despair. Three hundred years ago, Max passed that test with flying colors and joined the afterlife resolving never again to have innocent blood on his hands. Now a successful Demonic Intervention Agent, Max has been given the job of breaking a young woman’s family curse. But what she doesn’t know, what Max can’t bring himself to tell her, is that completing his mission almost certainly means her death.
When Felicity Woodsen inherits her mother’s coven, she learns each firstborn Woodsen daughter must become the consort of an evil-arch demon. Felicity’s only hope is to ally with the mysteriously charming Max. But is saving her body from one demon worth the price of losing her soul to another?
Less Blah Blah – More Ah Ha. How social savvy real estate agents become trusted, preferred, referred — and rewarded
Business & Investing
Author: Ken Brand
- $9.99 List Price
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Hateful real estate market conditions are traumatic enough without the compound fracture of sizzling competition and sky-high consumer expectations. Old school selfish-selling styles, along with chasing strangers, spamming, badgering friends and other unattractive and unproductive behaviors is causing real estate agents in Houston and across the country to struggle for relevance, self-respect and success.
This book leads readers through the three stages of Social Savvy Success. In Stage One the reader discovers the philosophical foundations for becoming more visible, choosable, and referable. In short, how to attract, instead of chase. In Chapters One to Eight the reader learns precisely what business they are really in; The Two True Secrets to Success; the high-impact dynamics of Top of Mind Awareness and how to earn True Blue Trust.
Reckless For Cowboy (Stampede Sizzlers)
Romance
Author: Daire St. Denis, Steena Holmes
When it comes to the Calgary Stampede, Brooke Hamilton has one piece of advice…stay away from cowboys!
Too bad she can’t follow it herself. You’d think it’d be easy, considering how badly she’s been burned. But the minute she meets Cooper Hays, saddle bronc rider and rodeo hotshot, her reckless heart falls hard and fast.
Eyes Behind Belligerence
War
Author: K.P. Kollenborn
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While two Japanese-American families endure the wake of Pearl Harbor’s wrath, each member must face the most painful question of their life: Where does their loyalty stand?
Told in five parts, this novel unravels the challenges between two unlikely Nisei friends, Jim and Russell, into adulthood during the Second World War. As restrictions are imposed, (even in the safe, rural community of Bainbridge Island,) as harassments escalate, (including the F.B.I. invading their homes and deporting their fathers to Montana for espionage trials,) the fated day arrives: evacuation of all Japanese civilians. Rounded up like cattle, tagged, they are hauled to the fringes of Death Valley: Manzanar. Together they must survive racism, gang violence, and the harsh elements of the environment.
Zero Point
Romance
Author: Tim Fairchild
- $3.99 List Price
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Deep inside a volcanic lava tube in the Canary Islands, a clue to an ancient archaeological treasure is discovered. Sinister forces, driven by greed and revenge, will stop at nothing in their effort to control the world’s newest energy source; an energy device that will make oil obsolete. A new and powerful weapon of mass destruction is on its final countdown to unleash nature’s ultimate fury; the likes never before witnessed by mankind. The fanatical leader of a secular movement will stop at nothing to ensure the ancient discoveries are never brought to light, even if it means – murder.
Sunfall Manor
Horror
Author: Peter Giglio
Edgar is a ghost cursed to spend his nights at Sunfall Manor, an apartment complex that was once a farmhouse in the flatlands of Nebraska. Every night he must move through five different dwellings, haunted by the living—a drunken and paranoid writer, an abused housewife, a colder-than-ice web-mistress, a two-bit drug dealer, and a crazy old man who plays with puppets—trying to unlock the secrets of who he is. But tonight is different. The lost souls of Sunfall Manor are ready to give up the ghost, and the past is ready to open its cold, unforgiving arms.
… See the rest of today’s Editor’s Picks and the Kindle Daily Deal here on page 2
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