EBooks - Fiction and NonFiction

In 1944 Italian officer Captain Francesco Verdi is captured by Allied forces in North Africa and shipped to a POW camp in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where the senior POW, the ruthless Kommandant Vogel, demands that all prisoners adhere to his Nazi dictates. His life threatened, Verdi escapes from the camp and meets up with an American woman, Chiara Frangiapani, who helps him elude capture as they flee to the Lower Peninsula. By 1956 they have become Frank and Claire Green, a young married couple building a new life in postwar Detroit. When INS agent James Giannopoulos tracks them down, Frank learns that Vogel is executing men like Frank for their wartime transgressions. As a series of brutal murders rivets Detroit, Frank is caught between American justice and Nazi vengeance. In Wolf 's Mouth, the recollections of Francesco Verdi/Frank Green give voice to the hopes, fears, and hard choices of a survivor as he strives to escape the ghosts of history.

Reaching 20,320 feet into and above the clouds, the peak of Denali is the highest and coldest summit in North America. In this novel of adventure, adversity, and ambition by renowned mountaineer and writer Nicholas O'Connell, four men set out to conquer it. Among the sharply drawn team members is narrator John Walker, a family man trying to choose between domestic stability and mountaineering's uncertain glory. In the course of their ascent the group battles avalanches, fierce winds, and mind-numbing cold before their bond begins to splinter, leading inexorably to tragedy.

When recently widowed Natalie Waters arrives at her family's cabin in Wisconsin's Northwoods, her plans for a quiet stay are complicated by a local timber wolf controversy and a scheme to find John Dillinger's hidden fortune.

Jack Mabie claims to be the meanest man in Alaska, yet the old sourdough seems to be just one of the crusty geezers in every roadhouse bewildered by how his lawless frontier life has morphed into the pastel 1950s world of martini cocktail bars up and down Fairbanks' Second Avenue. Sonia Petrievich, an editor at The Gold, her father Hank's weekly pro-statehood paper, learns through the mukluk telegraph about Jack's gleeful account of murders and robberies and shell games during the gold rush days. Her breezy March 1957 profile lets Jack revel in newfound notoriety. Edna Ferber, not completely satisfied with her forthcoming novel Ice Palace, has just returned for further research and is fascinated by Jack and his wild tales. Plus the previous summer, young Athabascan lawyer Noah West, a war hero and Sonia's lover, bent on bettering the lives of Alaskan Natives, had sharpened Edna's sense of a corner of the territory she'd ignored: "I felt I'd lost sight of the real Alaska, the heartless icebox in the North, the blank-eyed old-timers still haunted by gold ... ''d forgotten Alaska is still frontier ... a violent, mysterious world below the glossy skin I'd written about." When Jack is found beaten to death, Noah becomes a suspect.

A murder in a far off castle. A deadly struggle to survive ... An intense and gripping Medieval thriller. In the depths of winter at an ancient German castle, high up in the mountains, a noble is found dead under mysterious circumstances. Back at Rourell, Arnau is taking on the responsibilities of a full Templar Knight. But when he is tasked with returning Brother Lütolf's papers to settle a legal dispute between his family and the Order, Arnau is unexpectedly drawn into the killing at the castle. Here he enters a dark game of knives and double-crosses. Trapped in the ice-bound fortress, mastery of the sword is no longer enough. This is a different kind of war: one of shadows and whispered threats. Arnau must use all the guile he possesses, or risk succumbing to an icy tomb.

It is the summer of 1948 when a handsome, charismatic stranger, Charlie Beale, recently back from the war in Europe, shows up in the town of Brownsburg, a sleepy village nestled in the Valley of Virginia. All he has with him are two suitcases: one contains his few possessions, including a fine set of butcher knives; the other is full of money. A lot of money. Heading Out to Wonderful is a haunting, heart-stopping novel of love gone terribly wrong in a place where once upon a time such things could happen.

This classic mind-shattering tale, which "ranks high among the horror stories of the English language," plunges into the darkness of the Cthulhu mythos (Time). In the uncharted wastes of Antarctica, an exploration party from Miskatonic University encounters a gory sight when they discover their advance team's camp has been destroyed and its members slaughtered. There is no evidence of what happened except a series of burial mounds, six of which contain dead specimens of unknown species. Eight similar tombs are empty, but they haven't been broken into-they've been broken out of. What began as a search for knowledge soon becomes a terrifying confrontation with the true nature of the world and the universe in all its stark blackness and unyielding oblivion.

While being haunted by her late philandering husband who has come back as a ghost, Lady Adelaide (Addie) Compton is drawn into a real-life murder mystery when one of her houseguests is murdered, disrupting her careful seating arrangement.

The fabulous Phryne Fisher, her sister Beth and her faithful maid, Dot, decide that Luna Park is the perfect place for an afternoon of fun and excitement with Phryne's two daughters, Ruth and Jane. But in the dusty dark Ghost Train, amidst the squeals of horror and delight, a mummified bullet-studded corpse falls to the ground in front of them. Phryne Fisher's pleasure trip has definitely become business. Digging into this longstanding mystery takes her to the country town of Castlemaine where it's soon obvious that someone is trying to muzzle her investigations. With unknown threatening assailants on her path, Phryne seems headed for more trouble than usual....

Follow Buddy Steel on his most difficult and dangerous investigation yet as he stumbles upon corruption in his own backyard. When San Remo County Acting Sheriff Buddy Steel is deputized by the California Coastal Commission to investigate a reclusive Russian billionaire who has repeatedly violated state law by obstructing public access to his vast beachfront property, he makes a shocking discovery. And learns that the politicos, some with a history of corruption, some just chicken, will not back up enforcement. This makes Buddy, a former LAPD cop dragged home by his Sheriff father's ALS diagnosis to "temporarily" head the department, dig in his heels and face down the Russian's imported goon squad.

A weeklong ill-fated boating trip down the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia, to the lighthouse at Tybee Island. Chance and danger trump planning and intention at every turn, and the pull of the historic river and of fate itself propels Morris's characters with unrelenting force. Old friends Thomas Verdery and William Rhind, each seeking temporary escape from the failures of their lives, take to the river with Rhind's father. Verdery, a native southerner, has left his job and lover in Nepaug, Connecticut, while Rhind has lost his wife and child to his drinking. Encounters with dangerous weather and unhinged locals imperil the trio, who are held at gunpoint when they try to dock and soon are fighting among themselves. The hazards of the trip and a shocking loss along the way exacerbate William Rhind's drinking and tendencies toward violence. When Verdery and Rhind must become reluctant custodians to young Caron Lee, a lost girl from the backwoods family that had previously accosted them, tensions build toward explosive ends.

Thirty-year-old Max Maguire, detective with the NYPD, finds herself in France again as she is sent as a bodyguard to one of America's most famous wine critics, who is traveling to Bordeaux, France to taste some of the most expensive wines in the world. In the tragic circumstances that follow, Max is paired once again with French examining magistrate, Olivier Chaumont, with whom she had had a fling the year before while solving a case in Champagne. In the bi-cultural duo's pursuit of a murderer on the loose, they run headlong into a counterfeit operation that has them entering the fabulous chateaux on one side of the Atlantic, and extraordinary New York apartments, wine clubs, and auction houses on the other side as they desperately try to prevent more violence. Max and Olivier, sip fine wines and dine in fabulous restaurants as they interrogate both French and Americans, the majority of whom comprise the one percent. Readers will want to know: Will Max unite at last with her French family? Will she and Olivier heat up the night again? Will they, considering their cultural and personality differences, be able to solve the crime without wanting to kill each other?

A novel of breathtaking suspense, and a brilliant psychological portrait of a "Black Widow" serial killer.

The fifth Henry Kennis mystery takes us into the closed, gossip-riddled, back-stabbing world of Nantucket's community theater.
Horst Refn, the widely disliked and resented Artistic Director of the Nantucket Theater Lab, has been found stuffed into the meat freezer in his basement. Most of the actors, all the technical crew, and quite a few of the Theater Lab Board members, whom Refn was scamming and blackmailing, are suspects in his murder. The island's Police Chief Henry Kennis has to pick his way through a social minefield as he searches for the killer.
At the same time, daughter's new boyfriend, football star Hector Cruz, has been accused of sexting her. Carrie knows the offending pictures didn't come from him, and Henry has to prove it before the boy gets suspended, which means probing into the family secrets of Hector's father, a firebrand agitprop playwright, who happens to be a prime suspect in Refn's murder.

National Park Service volunteer Roberta "Bert" Lenehan has a plum assignment. She is to travel by boat to isolated Shackleford Island on North Carolina's Outer Banks. There, she will lend a hand in a roundup of the island's wild horses, which need to be counted and checked for disease.
But her plans for an idyllic couple of days are quickly shattered. A foal turns up missing. It appears that equine infectious anemia may be present among the herd, and that veterinary records were altered to hide it. And then one of the volunteers is found dead in the dunes. There are those who believe the roundup worker was trampled by the most spirited, troublesome stallion on the island, a conclusion Bert refuses to accept. In the meantime, her deepening relationship with park ranger Hunter O'Hagan runs into trouble. Complicating matters is the rumored discovery of a turtle carcass on the beach, an event that would bring coastal dredging operations to a halt and cost millions of dollars in revenue.

The gun used in Rowland Sinclair's father's death some thirteen years earlier has turned up in a drained dam at the family's country homestead in Yass. And when Rowland offends right-wing New Guard leader Eric Campbell, Campbell uses his influence to set the police to renew their inquiries into Henry Sinclair's death. Henry's friends had all been led to believe that the wealthy landowner had died in a much more respectable way. Rowland and his elder brother, Wil, had avoided any discussion of the event ever since-in fact the whole family had ducked the issue for over a decade, keeping secret that Sinclair senior was murdered. The possible involvement of the teenage Rowly and his older brother's intervention has been under the radar as well. But now the finger of blame is pointing squarely at the Sinclair black sheep, a man careless of what society and the authorities think of him. So he and the trio of artist friends who live in his Sydney suburban mansion, and generally have his back, avail themselves of a racing green Gypsy Moth (Rowland is a pioneer in air travel) and a yellow Mercedes sports car (another frightening mode of transport) to arrive in New South Wales' Southern Tablelands, bent on clearing Rowly's name.

In the winter of 1942, England lies cold and dark in the wartime blackout. One bleak evening, Councillor Grayling steps off the 6.12 from Euston, carrying £120 in cash, and oblivious to the fate that awaits him in the snow-covered suburbs.

Inspector Holly draws up a list of Grayling's fellow passengers: his distrusted employee Charles Evetts, the charming Hugh Rolandson, and an unknown refugee from Nazi Germany, among others. Inspector Holly will soon discover that each passenger harbours their own dark secrets, and that the councillor had more than one enemy among them.

A man is forbidden to uncover the secret of the tower in a fairy-tale castle by the Rhine. A headless corpse is found in a secret garden in Paris—belonging to the city's chief of police. And a drowned man is fished from the sea off the Italian Riviera, leaving the carabinieri to wonder why his socialite friends at the Villa Almirante are so unconcerned by his death.
These are three of the scenarios in this new collection of vintage crime stories. Detective stories from the golden age and beyond have used European settings—cosmopolitan cities, rural idylls and crumbling chateaux—to explore timeless themes of revenge, deception, murder and haunting.

When Asheville, NC, private eyes Sam Blackman and Nakayla Robertson are asked by an eighty-year-old client to investigate the suspicious death of her brother, they warn her there is little chance of success. Paul Weaver died nearly seventy years earlier. The only documentation she has is the sole surviving copy of a coroner's report stating his death was caused by an accidental fall while hiking. There's a red flag: local son Weaver knew every inch of the mountain trails. The returning World War II veteran had enrolled at Black Mountain College, a liberal local school with an international reputation for innovation, thanks to its stellar faculty and advisers like Buckminster Fuller and Albert Einstein. The college of the 1940s is currently being portrayed in a film being shot on the site of its former location. The plot is based on a book by a local author. The research behind both may provide a lead in the Weaver case.

Sandy Holston is addicted to fly fishing. She lives in rural Appalachia and receives occasional letters from her ex-husband whos in prison for bashing in a mans head. He promises to track her down and kill her when he gets out.

Hours before he is due to set off on a long-delayed and much-deserved vacation with his wife and son, Det.-Sgt. Malcolm Ainslie takes a phone call he would have been better off ignoring. The caller is the chaplain at Florida State Prison, delivering a message from Elroy Doil, the serial murderer Ainslie helped put on the prison's death row. On the eve of his execution, Doil has asked to make a confession. But there is a condition: he will deliver it only in person to Ainslie.

Introducing veteran Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Peter Cammon, this novel finds Cammon journeying to the Jurassic Coast to solve a seemingly ordinary domestic crime. At first glance, the perpetrator appears to have murdered his wife before drowning in the English Channel, but Cammon soon learns that his case is merely a sideshow. A broader series of murders has been unfolding along the cliffs, baffling the local police. Realizing that his assignment cannot be completed without figuring out the serial killings that threaten the region, the detective travels from London, Dorset, and Devon to the island of Malta, relentlessly following the overlapping threads of the two cases to their shocking climax.

This first collection of Father Brown mysteries, widely considered the author's best, includes "The Blue Cross" "The Hammer of God," "The Eye of Apollo" and more. Father Brown is the opposite of Sherlock Holmes -- the quiet, nondescript little priest whom nobody notices. Readers who enjoy classic fiction - and a good mystery - will love this special hand-crafted, digitally-formatted ebook edition.

Carolus Deene's housekeeper, the stoic Mrs. Stick, announces one evening that her husband has seen the body of a youth lying in a ditch with his hair shorn and his wrists slashed. Carolus knows that he has, at last, met a supreme challenge to test his powers of deduction. The redoubtable schoolmaster-turned-detective then becomes involved in a lively series of adventures infiltrating England's provincial cockney underworld and gaining insight into the dead boy's unhappy background and surroundings.

Winner of the 2016 B&N Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction In The Lightkeepers, we follow Miranda, a nature photographer who travels to the Farallon Islands, an exotic and dangerous archipelago off the coast of California, for a one-year residency capturing the landscape. Her only companions are the scientists studying there, odd and quirky refugees from the mainland living in rustic conditions; they document the fish populations around the island, the bold trio of sharks called the Sisters that hunt the surrounding waters, and the overwhelming bird population who, at times, create the need to wear hard hats as protection from their attacks.Shortly after her arrival, Miranda is assaulted by one of the inhabitants of the islands. A few days later, her assailant is found dead, perhaps the result of an accident. As the novel unfolds, Miranda gives witness to the natural wonders of this special place as she grapples with what has happened to her and deepens her connection (and her suspicions) to her companions, while falling under the thrall of the legends of the place nicknamed “the Islands of the Dead.”

Lorac (the pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett) liberally sprinkles the narrative with red herrings and fairly presents all the potential clues. Readers will enjoy watching the conflicts that arise between the wary country folk and the cocktail-drinking Londoners invading their habitat. In sum, this is jolly good fun.

Steeped in the rich history of Lake Superior's rugged North Shore, The Land of Dreams pursues two tales through a bleak and beautiful landscape haunted by the lives and dreams of its Scandinavian immigrants and Native Americans. Hansen finds himself equally haunted by the complex mysteries that continue to unravel around him.

In A Prayer for the Night, his fifth Ohio Amish Mystery, P. L. Gaus deftly balances the pace and practices of Amish life in northern Ohio against the unfolding urgency of a hostage situation. As Gaus has proven before, the mystery gains from its exploration of the ever-widening chasm between the traditional life of the Amish people and their interaction with the outside world.

Booklist Starred Review. Collects over thirty of the best entries in the Akashic noir series, including stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, and T. Jefferson Parker.

The cave of Lascaux may be closed to the public, but five scholars a day are allowed inside, and Nora Barnes has finagled an appointment. True, she may have fudged a bit in her letter to the authorities, but she does teach art history, and she isn't about to miss her chance to see the world's most famous prehistoric paintings. Nora and her high-spirited husband, Toby, are visiting the Dordogne, in the southern French region of the Aquitaine. Aware that the Dordogne's renown for cave art is matched only by its reputation for delicious cuisine, the couple has also signed up for a cooking class at a nearby château, but they soon find that more than food is on their minds.