Years ago, Christine Merrill had dreams of becoming a writer. Her big stumbling block was touch-typing. Six weeks spent on an IBM Selectric in her sophomore year of high school proved that she would never be able to produce one readable page of manuscript, much less several hundred.
Twenty years passed, and she found ways to pass the time: marrying her high school sweetheart; having two sons; and taking an assortment of jobs in professional theater costume shops, including a miserable year and a half spent styling wigs for a certain hamburger-selling clown and a couple of weeks working on a TV movie.
During that time, thank goodness, someone invented word processing, and a reliable spell checker. Christine returned to her childhood dream, only to discover that there was much more to writing than just accurate typing. The next years were spent learning to tell stories that people might want to read, and trying to find someone who wanted to buy them.
After years of work, she finally won the Romance Writer’s of America’s “Golden Heart” award for unpublished manuscripts with The Inconvenient Duchess, which tops today’s Buffet.
Christine is still writing novels from her home in Wisconsin, and sending them to her publisher in England.
As usual, each book listed here has gone FREE within the past 24 hours, except for the Bargain books in the yellow section below. Warning: Kindle book promotions can end without notice, so before downloading click the link “See Kindle price at Amazon” to verify that the book is still free. (Prices and availability may differ outside USA.)
The Inconvenient Duchess
Historical Romance
Author: Christine Merrill
Dear Cici and Father,
I have come to Devon and married a duke. And I’m more tired and hungry than I have ever been in my life. Please let me come home.
Compromised and wedded on the same day, Lady Miranda was fast finding married life not to her taste. A decaying manor and a secretive husband were hardly the stuff of girlish dreams. Yet every time she looked at dark, brooding Marcus Radwell, Duke of Haughleigh, she felt inexplicably compelled—and determined—to make their marriage real.
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The Last Jump: A Novel of World War II
History > Military > World War II
Author: John E. Nevola
The Last Jump is a story of discovery as a modern day journalist explores the military experience of his estranged father in World War II. Aware of the existence of a long lost family secret, our protagonist enlists the aid of four aging World War II veterans who knew his father.
When he finds out they know about the secret and have sworn an oath never to reveal it, he begins the difficult task of carefully cajoling the information from men he considers to be true heroes. His odyssey takes him back in time to a country vexed with racial and gender issues but united as never before or since.
After the last veteran passes away, his hopes are dashed but one reaches from beyond the grave toidentify the only other living person who who knows the secret and he races against death to reach her. A shocking conclusion awaits him, if only he can get there in time.
The Housemates: A Novel of Extreme Terror
Thrillers > Suspense
Author: Iain Rob Wright
What at first appears to be a wonderful opportunity for Damien Banks turns out to be the worst nightmare he can imagine.
Trapped inside a house with eleven strangers, and a booming voice known only as ‘The Landlord’ controlling his every move, Damien will be forced to compete not only for the money, but for his life.
Fire & Shadow
Teen & Young Adult > Science Fiction & Fantasy
Author: T.G. Ayer, Annetta Ribken
Normal people sneak out to a party and have fun. Maya Rao ends the evening by incinerating the guy who attacks her.
Nik Lucas, sexy, new in town and totally forbidden, happens to walk in on her. Normal guys would run for the hills. Nik knows a whole lot more than he’s telling.
Maya doesn’t believe the gods are real, doesn’t waste her time with mere mythology. But when gods, demons and hellhounds become the new normal and wielding fire becomes her new skill, she must decide what it is she really believes.
Can Maya accept that normal is something she will never be because it isn’t normal to be … The Hand of Kali.
Savior Frequency
Romantic Suspense
Author: Shane Scollins
“What if there was no way to determine if the thoughts in your head, were really your own? It’s not your computer you need to worry about being hacked, it’s your mind.”
Jordan Callahan is a regular guy, who’s always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Every moment in a crowd coils up with the anticipation that someone around him may die. It could be a tragic accident, or random act of violence. But there’s a good chance death is coming, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
Kayci Dewitt is running for her life, from the same clandestine government group for which she works and there’s no place to hide. If there is any hope to survive this mind-war, she’s going to have to unlock the ability that Jordan has been suppressing all his life.
The Sword and the Dragon
Fantasy > Magic & Wizards
Author: M. R. Mathias
When the Royal Wizard of Westland poisons the king so that his puppet prince can take the throne and start a continental war, a young squire is forced to run for his life carrying the powerful sword that his dying monarch burdened him with from the death bed.
Two brothers find a magic ring and start on paths to becoming the most powerful sort of enemies, while an evil young sorceress unwillingly falls in love with one of them when he agrees to help her steal a dragon’s egg for her father. Her father just happens to be the Royal Wizard, and despite his daughter’s feelings, he would love nothing more than to sacrifice the boy!
All of these characters, along with the Wolf King of Wildermont, the Lion Lord of Westland, and a magical hawk named Talon, are on a collision course toward Willa the Witch Queen’s palace in the distant kingdom of Highwander. There the very bedrock is formed of the powerful magical substance called Wardstone.
The Luck of the Weissensteiners
Historical Fiction
Author: Christoph Fischer
In the sleepy town of Bratislava in 1933, a romantic girl falls for a bookseller from Berlin. Greta Weissensteiner, daughter of a Jewish weaver, slowly settles into life with the Winkelmeier clan. The political climate and slow disintegration of the multi-cultural society in Czechoslovakia becomes more complex and affects relations between the couple and their families.
Origins: Centurion’s Rise
Science Fiction > Alternative History
Author: Mark Henrikson
Regularly $3.99, Today $0.99
Book 2 in the Origins series
ROME. The mere mention of the name instills images of grandeur. The mighty empire was a guiding light for the civilized world for a thousand years. Was that by chance or careful design?
A psychiatric patient named Hastelloy has the answer. He believes he was there for it all: Caesar, legions, gladiators. According to his tale even the great gods Jupiter, Vesta and the advent of Christianity were not immune to his influence. Is he crazy or is it still crazy to ignore him?
Meanwhile, an NSA agent closes in on the location of his abducted partner and answers to the age old question – are we alone in the universe? To gain enlightenment he will have to face specters from his own past to safeguard himself, his family, and possibly the entire planet. The stakes have never been higher for him or his clandestine agency.
Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Jesus Christ. You may know the names and dates, but not the why or how. This gripping thriller will challenge everything you thought you knew about the most dynamic era in human history and draw into question if there will be a future. Once again, the Origins of all will be revealed.
Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut Series)
Science Fiction > Satire
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Regularly $7.99, Today $1.99
Adapted for a magnificent George Roy Hill film three years later (perhaps the only film adaptation of a masterpiece which exceeds its source), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is the now famous parable of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran and POW, who has in the later stage of his life become “unstuck in time” and who experiences at will (or unwillingly) all known events of his chronology out of order and sometimes simultaneously.
Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut’s usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralmafadorians who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).
The “unstuck” nature of Pilgrim’s experience may constitute an early novelistic use of what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; then again, Pilgrim’s aliens may be as “real” as Dresden is real to him.
Slaughterhouse-Five was hugely successful, brought Vonnegut an enormous audience, was a finalist for the National Book Award and a bestseller and remains four decades later as timeless and shattering a war fiction as Catch-22, with which it stands as the two signal novels of their riotous and furious decade.
Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently
Management & Leadership > Motivational
Author: John C. Maxwell
Regular Price $9.99, Today $2.99
The world’s most respected leadership expert gives five principles and five practices for breaking the invisible barrier to leadership and personal success.
You have a good idea but can’t convince your peers of its merit. You crafted a groundbreaking strategy, but the team trudges on in the same old way. Certain people seem to moving forward in their career while you seem to be stuck. If this describes you or someone you know, the problem is not the quality of what you have to offer. The problem is how you connect with people to create the results you desire.
Maxwell takes readers through the Five Connecting Principles and the Five Connecting Practices of top-notch achievers. He believes that a person’s ability create change and results in any organization-be it a company, church, nonprofit, or even a family-are directly tied to their ability to use the teachings of this book.
Mystic River
Psychological Thrillers
Author: Dennis Lehane
Regular Price $9.99, Today $2.99
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled tip to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened — something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever.
Twenty-five years later, Sean Devine is a homicide detective. Jimmy Marcus is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave Boyle is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay — demons that urge him to do terrible things.
When Jimmy Marcus’s daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned to the case. His personal life unraveling, he must go back into a world he thought he’d left behind to confront not only the violence, of the present but the nightmares of his past. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy Marcus, who finds that his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave Boyle, who came home the night Jimmy’s daughter died covered with someone else’s blood.
… See the rest of today’s Editor’s Picks here on page 2