Edgar Award-winning Julie Smith tops today’s Buffet with True-Life Adventure, her classic mystery. This first installment in the “Paul McDonald” private investigator series first appeared as a Mysterious Press hardcover in 1985.
Fans of Murder, She Wrote and Ellery Queen will enjoy this funny take on the mystery-writer-as-detective.
Julie was born in Annapolis, Maryland, grew up in Savannah, Georgia, and graduated from the University of Mississippi. She then worked as a journalist for 16 years, beginning as a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. She then moved on to the San Francisco Chronicle, where she became the first woman hired for the newsroom since World War II. She quit the Chronicle in 1979 to form a freelance writing and editing firm called Invisible Ink with several other aspiring fiction writers, including Marcia Muller, and sold her first novel, Death Turns a Trick, in 1982.
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True-Life Adventure (Paul McDonald Mystery, Book 1)
Mystery > Private Investigators
Author: Julie Smith
Mystery novelist Paul McDonald finds himself forced into the role of detective, after his home is broken into and set afire and his P.I. boss is killed. The trail leads Paul to the laboratory of a Nobel laureate geneticist and then to City Hall–where an extremely nasty surprise awaits him.
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Wings in the Night (part 1)
Romance
Author: Maggie Shayne
Indulge in six dark and sexy tales from Maggie Shayne’s award-winning vampire series Wings in the Night. Part 1 of the collection includes Twilight Phantasies, Twilight Memories, Twilight Illusions, Beyond Twilight, Born in Twilight, and Twilight Vows.
Run run as fast as you can (Emma Frost #3)
Horror > International Mystery & Crime
Author: Willow Rose
Simone Beaumont is having a rough day. She is exhausted. Her baby is crying non-stop, she is in a fight with her husband and hasn’t spoken to him since last night. A big part of her want to just leave everything. To run away from it all. To vanish. She is considering it while putting her screaming baby in her car seat when suddenly she meets a man in the parking lot who without asking her makes her wish come true.
Emma Frost has just come home from a trip to Eastern Europe when the body of Simone Beaumont is being found. It turns out she was part of Sophia’s mothers’ group and soon the small group is shaken by yet another disappearance.
Swallowtail
Fantasy > Paranormal & Urban
Author: Sheri Meshal
Chicago wife, mother and finance executive Claire Cummings, arrives at work one morning to discover her friend Julia has embezzled millions and vanished. Blindsided and devastated by the betrayal, she’s sent home pending further investigation. Claire’s bizarre death the following day sends everyone reeling, guessing and looking for her in all the wrong places. In no time she’s addicted to an enchanting menagerie of tricks and techniques for getting the living’s attention, but most people are harder to reach than she’d ever dreamed and even harder to set free.
She was still a mother, a wife, a daughter and a friend… she’d move heaven and earth to keep it that way.
Memory Scents
Psychological Thrillers
Author: Gayle Eileen Curtis
She looked even more beautiful now than she had when she’d been alive. her green eyes were still sparkling, but now glazed they held a snapshot of the fear she had endured only moments previously. Death fascinated Tim. The way a person’s eyes altered, showing no emotion, becoming empty, coloured oval shaped glass. He loved that part, when he could reflect on the stillness of his victim like a photo in an album.
It’s been ten years since the disappearance of Alice and her mother, Eve can’t process the information she may have been murdered by a serial killer. She finds solace in writing Alice love letters, believing this will bring her daughter home, but years of denial, pain and isolation have left behind an inability to accept the truth.
A series of unsolved child murders is the shocking news that greets Chrissie shortly after moving to a picturesque North Norfolk coastal village. Sinister paranormal activity in her idyllic cottage causes her to wonder if she is receiving a message from one of the victims, or if her memory is playing tricks on her and she is recalling a past life. Many eerie coincidences begin to reveal the truth.
TODAY’S BARGAINS……………What’s this?
PRIMAL Vengeance (The PRIMAL Series)
Thrillers > Espionage
Author: Jack Silkstone
Regularly $9.99, Today $1.99
The native Dinka tribe of South Sudan is waging a war of wills for a better future—against a ruthless Chinese magnate determined to possess the impoverished nation’s only asset: its oil-rich land. It’s a David-and-Goliath struggle in danger of ending brutally in the giant’s favor thanks to the murderous forces of the Janjaweed, the dreaded Arab militia that outnumbers and outguns the Dinka’s ragtag freedom fighters. A bloodbath in the name of corporate greed seems assured—until the crusading warriors of PRIMAL step in to do what politics and so-called peacekeepers can’t.
With eyes in the sky, boots on the ground, and the best high-tech hardware that well-spent millions can buy, Bishop, Mirza, Saneh, and the entire PRIMAL roster of combat all-stars will rally a downtrodden country’s proud patriots to action. From desolate Sudan to downtown Shanghai and back, PRIMAL will go blow for blow with a merciless enemy that’s begging for a lesson in double-barreled diplomacy.
Off The Record
Romance > New Adult & College
Author: Sawyer Bennett
Regularly $3.99, Today $1.99
Ever Montgomery suffered the ultimate betrayal by the one man who she should have been able to count on for anything. It has left her hurt, jaded and incapable of forming relationships, but it also means that she can spot a liar a mile away. These traits are earning her a reputation as a reporter with a keen nose for a good story and a complete understanding of the extreme power of the written word.
Lincoln Caldwell, is the hot goalie for the New York Rangers. At twenty-four and a rising star, he works hard and he plays even harder. He’s gorgeous and carefree–the ultimate charmer. Ladies fall at his feet and the single life has never been lived the way Linc Caldwell does it.
When Ever publishes an article about Linc containing information that she received off the record, she finds herself on the receiving end of the athlete’s fury. Rather than basking in the glory of exposing Linc as a shameless user of women, she finds herself at his mercy when he demands and receives retribution. Required by her editor to trail Linc for six weeks, Ever is forced to look at the real Linc Caldwell.
And she just might find that she has misjudged him.
Black Widow: The Name of the Rose
Graphic Novels > Superheroes
Author: Marjorie Liu, Daniel Acuna
Regularly $8.99, Today $1.99
Collects Black Widow #1-5. Natasha Romanoff is the Black Widow, longtime Avengers and a spy for even longer. But now someone has tried to kill Natasha…and almost succeeded. Injured gravely, almost beyond her ability to recover, Black Widow sets out to find her attacker.
A Gentle Rain
Romance > Contemporary
Author: Deborah Smith
Regularly $9.99, Today $1.99
Kara Whittenbrook is an unlikely heiress. Down-to-earth and lovably quirky, she’s never fit in with the stogy Whittenbrook clan of Connecticut. Growing up at her parents’ rainforest preserve in Brazil, she has a quaintly off-beat view of life. Now her beloved parents have died in a plane crash, and Kara’s learned a stunning truth. She was adopted. Her birth parents are Mac and Lily Tolbert. They live and work on a backwoods cattle ranch in northern Florida.
Ranch owner Ben Thocco is running out of time and money. He’s going to need a miracle in order to save the ranch and care for the likable crew of unusual hands he employs, including Kara’s parents and his own fragile brother Joey. Kara, using a fake identity on the advice of her lawyer, gets a job at Ben’s ranch in Fountain Springs, Florida, where her adventures include entering an unpredictable mare in a local horse show.
The Secrets of Mary Bowser
Historical Fiction
Author: Lois Leveen
Regularly $9.99, Today $1.99
Based on the remarkable true story of a freed African American slave who returned to Virginia at the onset of the Civil War to spy on the Confederates, The Secrets of Mary Bowser is a masterful debut by an exciting new novelist. Author Lois Leveen combines fascinating facts and ingenious speculation to craft a historical novel that will enthrall readers of women’s fiction, historical fiction, and acclaimed works like Cane River and Cold Mountain that offer intimate looks at the twin nightmares of slavery and Civil War.
A powerful and unforgettable story of a woman who risked her own freedom to bring freedom to millions of others, The Secrets of Mary Bowser celebrates the courageous achievements of a little known but truly inspirational American heroine.
… See the rest of today’s Editor’s Picks here on page 2