📚 Free Kindle books: FBI agents, a Bahamas bartender, Death's daughter, and Nebraska cornfields 📚
free reads spanning terrorism thrillers, cozy mysteries, serial killer suspense, Regency romance, post-apocalyptic fiction, and one very unusual afterlife gameshow investigation
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Somewhere Safe (Piper Woods Book 1)
Author: Molly Black
FREE
FBI Suspense Thriller
Former FBI Special Agent Piper Woods walked away from everything after a case that nearly destroyed her. A trained survivalist and expert tracker who grew up in Alaska, she retreated off the grid to rebuild a life far from the darkness she’d spent years chasing. She was done. Then her former partner called with a case only she could solve: a governor’s daughter taken by a killer deep into wilderness that no ordinary agent could navigate. 🌲
Molly Black builds her Piper Woods series on a premise that FBI thrillers rarely attempt — a protagonist whose most essential skills are analog rather than institutional. Piper’s value isn’t her badge or her clearance; it’s the fact that she can track a human being through terrain that would kill anyone who didn’t grow up in it. The wilderness setting gives the cat-and-mouse dynamic a physical immediacy that office-bound procedurals can’t replicate. 🔍
The tension between Piper’s determination to stay gone and the pull of the one type of case she can’t walk away from gives the series opener genuine character stakes alongside the thriller plot. She’s not reluctantly heroic in the ways FBI fiction usually offers — she’s specifically, unusually qualified, and that specificity is what makes her compelling. 🏔️
What makes this gripping from page one: A taut FBI thriller about a former agent who traded her career for life off the grid — until a child abduction in the wilderness demands skills only she possesses. Free today and a strong series opener for fans of Kendra Elliot and Robert Dugoni who want their suspense set somewhere remote, their heroines genuinely formidable, and their pages turning well past midnight.
Any Means Necessary (A Luke Stone Thriller Book 1)
Author: Jack Mars
FREE
Terrorism Thrillers
Nuclear waste stolen from a New York City hospital in the middle of the night. Jihadists with a 48-hour window to build a dirty bomb and hit a target so high-value it leads all the way to the Oval Office. FBI Special Agent Luke Stone — former special forces, head of an elite classified unit — is the only man capable of peeling back a conspiracy this deep. Then someone frames him for the crime. 💣
Jack Mars writes terrorism thrillers with the breathless forward momentum the genre demands at its best — the Luke Stone series launches with a scenario calibrated to deliver maximum urgency from page one, and the conspiracy architecture is layered enough to sustain genuine surprises while keeping the action sequences front and center. Stone is built for readers who want their heroes physically formidable and morally clear without being cartoonishly simple. 🇺🇸
The framing subplot — which forces Stone to operate outside official channels while hunting the very people who set him up — gives the procedural thriller structure an additional layer of personal stakes. With his team threatened and his family in danger, Stone has to outthink a sophisticated enemy using only the skills and instincts he built before anyone was handing him resources. 🔒
Why this grips from page one: A pulse-pounding terrorism thriller featuring a framed FBI agent, stolen nuclear material, and a 48-hour countdown to a catastrophic attack on the President of the United States. Free today — perfect for fans of Vince Flynn and Brad Thor who want their political thrillers relentlessly plotted, their heroes battle-tested, and their twists landing like a punch.
On the Rocks (Ruby Steele Book 1)
Author: Mia Gold
FREE
Cozy Mystery
Ruby Steele looks like any other American expat hiding out in the Bahamas, tending bar at a seedy beachside joint and keeping a low profile. She is not. She’s a mixed-martial-arts professional who walked away from a championship career because she knows where bodies are buried — literally — and staying alive means staying invisible. Then a dead tourist turns up in the dumpster behind her bar at three in the morning, and invisible is no longer an option. 🌴
Mia Gold blends cozy mystery with action-heroine thriller in a combination that shouldn’t work as well as it does — the Bahamian setting is rendered with genuine atmosphere, the mystery is properly puzzling, and Ruby is the kind of protagonist who can both solve a crime and physically handle whoever committed it. The local cops who’d rather pin it on the convenient outsider add a procedural friction that keeps the stakes personal. 🍹
The character backstory — the deliberately vague suggestion of a dangerous past that forced Ruby off the circuit — gives the series opener a second layer of intrigue beneath the murder plot, and Gold parcels out the revelations with the timing of someone who understands that a good series protagonist is built slowly. Ruby is fun company: funny, capable, and operating on survival instincts that have kept her alive through things she hasn’t explained yet. 🔍
What makes this irresistible: A sharp, sun-drenched cozy mystery featuring a Bahamas bartender with a championship MMA career in her past, a dead tourist she didn’t ask for, and a simple choice: solve the murder or take the fall. Free today — perfect for fans of Janet Evanovich and Diane Mott Davidson who want their amateur sleuths genuinely dangerous and their settings warm enough to read on the coldest winter nights.
Not Like Us (An Ilse Beck Mystery Book 1)
Author: Ava Strong
FREE
Suspense
Ilse Beck survived a traumatic childhood in Germany, rebuilt herself in America as a renowned psychologist, and became the world’s leading expert in a narrow, haunting specialty: the psychological aftermath of serial killer survival. By studying how survivors process their trauma, she developed an unparalleled window into the minds of killers themselves. She never expected to become an FBI agent. She especially never expected to become a target. 🧠
Ava Strong constructs the Ilse Beck series on a psychological framework more sophisticated than most FBI thrillers attempt — the protagonist’s expertise in survivor trauma isn’t a narrative convenience but the actual mechanism by which she reads killers, which gives her investigative methods genuine specificity. When a new patient presents with paranoid certainty that her roadside encounter with a serial killer isn’t over, Ilse’s professional instincts and personal history begin to collide. 🔍
The revelation that the killer has shifted focus to Ilse herself transforms the novel’s second half — suddenly the world’s foremost expert in understanding these crimes has to apply her knowledge to her own survival, which is the kind of structural irony that psychological suspense does best when it commits to the premise fully. Strong executes it with enough clinical detail to feel credible and enough momentum to feel thrilling. 🌑
Why this captivates from page one: A taut psychological thriller featuring an FBI agent whose expertise in serial killer psychology makes her uniquely valuable to investigators — and uniquely interesting to the killer she’s hunting. Free today — perfect for fans of Lisa Gardner and Karin Slaughter who want their suspense deeply character-rooted, their psychology credible, and their endings genuinely surprising.
Come Get Me (A Caitlin Dare Mystery Book 1)
Author: Molly Black
FREE
Women Sleuths
A serial killer is using America’s rail network as a hunting ground, and the FBI needs someone to stop him. They choose Special Agent Caitlin Dare to lead the joint task force — a decision that is either brilliant or catastrophic, because Caitlin has a missing sister, an unsolved case that haunts her, an erratic railroad conductor uncle, and a bone-deep terror of trains. 🚂
Molly Black constructs the Caitlin Dare series on a psychological contradiction that gives the FBI thriller format unusual depth — the investigator most qualified to catch this killer is the one for whom the investigation is most personally devastating. The train setting is rendered with the kind of specific, claustrophobic atmosphere that makes location a genuine character rather than backdrop, and the serial killer’s method gives the investigation a ticking-clock urgency that spans the entire country. 🔍
Caitlin’s personal demons aren’t decorative backstory but active plot — the missing sister case and the fear of trains both bear directly on what she’s hunting and why she can’t look away from it. Black builds the character with enough specificity to make the trauma feel real rather than procedural, which is what separates a series worth following from one that delivers a single satisfying read. 🌑
What makes this essential: A gripping FBI thriller about a serial killer hunting victims across America’s railroad network — and the brilliant, haunted agent chosen to stop him despite a terror of trains that goes straight to the heart of her past. Free today — perfect for fans of Rachel Caine and Teresa Driscoll who want their crime fiction character-driven, their pacing relentless, and their twists genuinely earned.
Aged for Murder (Tuscan Vineyard Book 1)
Author: Fiona Grace
FREE
Cozy Animal Mystery
Olivia Glass is 34, successful, and miserable. She just created an ad campaign so effective it’s being celebrated company-wide — and she’s ashamed of every word of it. The promotion she’s been angling for is finally on the table. Her long-term boyfriend is about to propose. And she finds out he’s been cheating on her. Sometimes the universe accelerates decisions you’ve been avoiding. 🍷
Fiona Grace built the Tuscan Vineyard Cozy Mystery series on the most satisfying of cozy foundations — the life-blowing-up-and-rebuilding premise — and executes it with the warmth and lightness the genre does best. Olivia’s dream of moving to Tuscany and starting her own vineyard goes from fantasy to urgent necessity when a cottage opportunity arrives at precisely the right moment, and Grace renders the Italian setting with enough sensory detail to make the relocation feel like an invitation to the reader as well. 🌿
The mystery element — which arrives once Olivia settles into Tuscan life — is the kind of cozy puzzle that fits naturally into the domestic rhythms of small-community living, and the series’ animal companions add the warmth that cozy mystery readers have come to expect from the genre’s best practitioners. For readers who want their mysteries gentle and their settings gorgeous, this is the series. 🐾
Why this delights from page one: A warm, sun-soaked cozy mystery about a woman who escapes a life that stopped fitting her for a Tuscan cottage, a vineyard dream, and a murder she absolutely didn’t plan on. Free today — perfect for fans of Diane Mott Davidson and M.C. Beaton who want their amateur sleuths charming, their settings transporting, and their reading experience genuinely restorative.
Before He Kills (Mackenzie White Book 1)
Author: Blake Pierce
FREE
Suspense
A woman found strung up on a pole in the Nebraska cornfields. A killer with a method so distinctive and so baffling that the local force — chauvinistic veterans who resent needing help — have no choice but to call in Detective Mackenzie White. She’s young and she’s a woman and they hate both of those things. She’s also the only person in the room capable of cracking what the FBI is now calling a serial case. 🌽
Blake Pierce’s Mackenzie White series opens with the kind of procedural setup that serial killer fiction does at its best — an impossible crime scene, an investigator operating under institutional hostility, and a killer whose psychology defies easy pattern recognition. Pierce gives Mackenzie a dark personal history that intersects uncomfortably with the case she’s hunting, which is the structural move that separates character-driven thriller from pure puzzle-solving. 🔍
The FBI involvement escalates the investigation while adding an attraction subplot that Pierce handles with enough restraint to avoid derailing the central tension. Mackenzie’s obsessive immersion in the killer’s psychology — the way she follows his logic into increasingly dark cognitive territory — gives the novel’s climax genuine stakes that feel earned rather than manufactured. 🌑
What makes this essential: A sharply plotted serial killer thriller set in rural Nebraska, featuring a brilliant young detective who has to fight her own department’s hostility while tracking a killer whose methods are unlike anything the FBI has encountered. Free today — perfect for fans of Thomas Harris and Jonathan Kellerman who want their psychological suspense methodical, their detectives psychologically complex, and their killers genuinely frightening.
Always Carry Your Scythe
Author: Pip Paisley
FREE
Humorous Fantasy
Trixie D’Vita did not inherit the family scythe. That was her mother’s department. Death’s department, specifically — because Trixie’s mom is Death, which makes family dinners complicated and career counseling essentially nonexistent. When the Angel Investigative Bureau turns up at Aunt Harry’s bar looking for Death in connection with a soul-misappropriation scandal on the hottest afterlife gameshow in the Mystical Realms, they find Trixie instead. Armed with a pocket-scythe and very few good options. ☠️
Pip Paisley writes humorous fantasy with the inventive energy of someone who genuinely enjoys building absurdist mythologies from scratch — the afterlife bureaucracy, the trans-dimensional gameshow, the scythe-based family legacy — and executes it with the light touch that separates comic fantasy that works from comic fantasy that exhausts. The worldbuilding is dense enough to feel inhabited without being heavy enough to slow the rollicking pace. 🌈
The cast surrounding Trixie — a trainee AIB agent traipsing toward trouble, skittle-colored demons, werewolf drag queens, hellhound-doodle puppies — reads like the output of a writer who gave herself permission to follow every delightful idea to its logical conclusion. The result is funny, warm, and genuinely surprising in ways that straight fantasy rarely manages. ✨
Why this charms from page one: A rollicking, wonderfully weird humorous fantasy about the estranged daughter of Death, an afterlife gameshow fraud investigation, and a pocket-scythe that turns out to be more useful than anticipated. Free today — perfect for fans of Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde who want their fantasy whimsical, their humor sharp, and their trans-dimensional vortexes appropriately gaping.
Tamed by a Passionate Lady
Author: Henrietta Harding
FREE
Regency Historical Romance
Adaline Townshend is a woman who has everything a Regency marriage is supposed to provide — and none of what she actually wants. Her husband James is present, respectable, and utterly unreachable. No matter what she does to close the distance between them, she barely registers in his world. What Adaline doesn’t know — and what James has never told anyone — is that the wall between them isn’t indifference. It’s a secret he’s been carrying since long before she married him. 💐
Henrietta Harding builds her Regency romance on a premise that the genre handles with particular effectiveness when it commits fully — the marriage of convenience haunted by a secret that makes genuine intimacy impossible until it’s confronted. The dual-perspective structure gives both characters moral interiority: Adaline’s longing is rendered with dignity rather than desperation, and James’s secret, when it arrives, reframes everything that came before. 🌹
The push-pull of a marriage that should work and doesn’t, between two people who are fundamentally compatible but blocked by something neither can acknowledge, is the emotional engine that Regency romance does best — and Harding uses the period’s particular constraints on emotional honesty to make the barriers feel genuinely credible rather than manufactured. 🕯️
What makes this captivating: A lush, emotionally layered Regency romance about a devoted wife, a husband hiding a painful secret, and a marriage that can’t become what either of them needs until the truth finally comes to light. Free today — perfect for fans of Georgette Heyer and Mary Balogh who want their historical romance tender, their secrets meaningful, and their resolutions genuinely worth the wait.
Sweet Saboteur (The Cozy Café Book 1)
Author: C. A. Phipps
FREE
Cozy Culinary Mystery
Scarlett has poured everything into keeping the family café alive — long hours, hard work, and a stubbornness that small-town Cozy Hollow has come to recognize as a defining character trait. The café is already fragile. The rumors starting to circulate through town could be enough to finish it off. And then someone turns up dead, and the café is right in the middle of the story everyone is telling about it. ☕
C.A. Phipps writes small-town cozy mystery with the genre’s essential pleasures intact — a community rendered with enough specific detail to feel genuinely inhabited, a protagonist whose personal stakes in the investigation go beyond civic duty, and a mystery with enough suspects and secrets to sustain genuine suspense through the resolution. The café setting gives the culinary cozy its natural backdrop, and Phipps uses the kitchen and the gossip network with equal skill. 🍰
Scarlett’s voice is the series’ real asset — practical, a little weary, and possessed of the particular stubborn loyalty to family and place that small-town cozy heroines need to feel real rather than generic. The threat to the café gives the murder investigation immediate personal stakes, which is exactly the structural move that distinguishes compelling cozy mystery from its more procedural cousins. 🌸
Why this delights from page one: A warm, charming cozy culinary mystery set in small-town Cozy Hollow, featuring a café owner fighting to keep her family’s dream alive against deadly gossip, a suspicious death, and a community with more secrets than it’s letting on. Free today and a perfect series opener for fans of Joanne Fluke and Diane Mott Davidson who want their mysteries cozy, their food descriptions mouthwatering, and their small towns worth visiting.
What Happened to Lori (Konrath Collective Book 9)
Author: J.A. Konrath
FREE
Conspiracy Thrillers
Three people. Each carrying a secret. Each running an agenda. All three lying about something significant. One committed a terrible crime. One is on the run. More than one has killed. What connects them — what none of them fully understands yet — is Lori. And what happened to her is the revelation that Konrath has structured the entire novel to deliver. 🕵️
J.A. Konrath is one of thriller fiction’s most technically sophisticated architects of surprise, and What Happened to Lori is the series entry that most directly foregrounds his structural obsessions — the unreliable narrator taken to its logical extreme, three separate deceptions converging on a single truth that recontextualizes everything that preceded it. The promise in the title is the promise of the book: you will not see it coming. 🌑
The multi-perspective format, which Konrath uses to layer misdirection across three separate storylines, rewards the kind of active reading that conspiracy thrillers demand at their best — each character is a puzzle, and the reader’s job is to figure out which pieces of each account are lies before the reveal does it for them. Most readers won’t succeed. That’s the point. 🔀
What makes this essential: A brilliantly constructed conspiracy thriller built around three liars, one terrible crime, and a twist so well-engineered that even readers who pride themselves on seeing endings coming tend to miss this one. Free today — perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn and S.J. Watson who want their psychological thrillers ruthlessly plotted, their narrators genuinely untrustworthy, and their final reveals genuinely shocking.
Old Man’s War (Old Man’s Apocalypse Book 1)
Author: AJ Newman
FREE
Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
The apocalypse arrived without drama — no bombs, no EMP pulse, no grid collapse. Just governmental incompetence compounding financial fraud until the whole structure failed, slowly and then all at once. Jeff Mann is 58 years old, an avid reader of post-apocalyptic fiction, and uniquely positioned to recognize that all those novels got it wrong. What followed the collapse wasn’t a dramatic catastrophe but something slower and crueler: riots, then starvation, then the billionaires retreating to their compounds while everyone else fought to survive. ☢️
AJ Newman writes post-apocalyptic fiction with the grounded, unglamorous realism that the best entries in the genre share — the collapse in Old Man’s War is political and financial rather than spectacular, which makes it considerably more unsettling than the scenarios involving mushroom clouds. Jeff’s age is a deliberate narrative choice that separates the series from the young-protagonist survival fiction that dominates the genre, giving the story a different emotional register and a different set of practical concerns. 🌍
The human trafficking thread — which begins when Jeff saves two women from slavers and grows into a crusade — gives the survival narrative a moral center that pure resource-acquisition stories often lack. One man, two women, and a world that has decided most people are expendable: the stakes are personal before they’re heroic, which is exactly where post-apocalyptic fiction is most interesting. 🔥
Why this grips from page one: A grounded, unnervingly plausible post-apocalyptic thriller about a collapse driven by governmental failure rather than spectacle — and one 58-year-old man’s one-person crusade against human trafficking in a world that’s stopped caring. Free today — perfect for fans of James Wesley Rawles and William Forstchen who want their apocalypse fiction realistic, their protagonists unconventional, and their moral stakes genuinely high.
A Proud Woman (Tabitha & Wolf Book 1)
Author: Sarah F. Noel
Regularly $6.99, Today $3.49
Historical Mystery
Tabitha, the young widowed Countess of Pembroke, has already been written off by polite society. At twenty-two, the expectation is that she’ll grieve quietly, keep her opinions to herself, and accept whatever comes next with appropriate deference. What comes next is Wolf — Jeremy Wolfson Chesterton, a dashing distant cousin with a London underworld reputation who inherits the earldom and brings his past with him into Mayfair. 🎩
Sarah F. Noel builds the Tabitha & Wolf series on a pairing that historical mystery handles with particular effectiveness — a protagonist whose social position makes her both vulnerable and observant, partnered with an outsider whose underworld connections make him useful in places Mayfair respectability can’t reach. The tension between Wolf’s attempt to leave his past behind and the shadowy figures who won’t allow it gives the mystery its forward momentum. 🔍
Tabitha’s refusal to accept the diminished role assigned to her is the character engine that drives the series, and Noel renders her defiance with the kind of specific, grounded detail that makes period-authentic heroines feel genuinely alive rather than anachronistically modern. The Mayfair setting — its rules, its gossip networks, its particular cruelties — is handled with care that historical mystery readers will recognize and appreciate. 🕯️
What makes this captivating: A richly atmospheric Victorian mystery featuring a proud young countess, a new earl with a dangerous past, and a partnership that shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does. On sale today for $3.49 — perfect for fans of C.S. Harris and Anna Lee Huber who want their historical mysteries character-rich, their period detail immersive, and their central partnerships built on genuine mutual respect.
The Vicarage Murder (Monica Noble Book 1)
Author: Faith Martin
Regularly $4.99, Today $2.49
Amateur Sleuth Mysteries
Monica Noble is throwing a welcome party for the village’s newest residents. The guests include a celebrity chef, his wife, an Oxford professor, a divorcée, and the owner of a gym chain. The drinks are flowing. Then a shotgun blast rings out and one of the guests is dead. In a quiet Cotswold village, everyone knew each other, everyone had secrets, and apparently at least one person had a reason to commit murder. 🏡
Faith Martin writes English village mystery in the tradition the genre has been refining since Agatha Christie — the contained community, the drawing-room cast of suspects, the detective who operates on instinct and observation rather than official authority. Monica’s status as the vicar’s wife gives her both access and cover: she can be present at every gathering, ask questions that official investigators can’t, and be underestimated by virtually everyone whose secrets she’s uncovering. 🍵
The second murder — a strangling nearly a week after the first — escalates the investigation and confirms that the village is hiding something more organized than a crime of passion. Martin parcels out the suspects’ secrets with the measured timing of an author who has internalized the genre’s rhythms, and the Cotswold setting is rendered with the cozy warmth that makes English village mystery so persistently satisfying to its devoted readership. 🌿
Why this delights from page one: A beautifully crafted English village mystery featuring a vicar’s wife with a talent for investigation, a welcome party that ends in gunfire, and a Cotswold community where everyone has something to hide. On sale today for $2.49 — perfect for fans of M.C. Beaton and Ann Granger who want their amateur sleuths warmly drawn, their English settings picture-perfect, and their mysteries satisfyingly traditional.
Secrets in Calusa Cove (Everglades Overwatch Book 1)
Author: Elle James, Jen Talty
Regularly $5.99, Today $2.99
Action & Adventure Romance
Sixteen years ago, Audra McCain watched her father disappear into the Everglades — saw flashes of violence, felt a sharp pain, and woke up alone. The town of Calusa Cove decided she was a Stigini, a swamp owl witch, and treated her accordingly. Now she’s a wildlife photographer returning for the annual python challenge, determined to reclaim her life and recover the memory she lost. Someone in Calusa Cove is equally determined she never does. 🐊
Elle James and Jen Talty collaborate on the Everglades Overwatch series with a setting that gives the action-romance hybrid its best natural asset — the Florida Everglades, with its dangerous wildlife, maze-like waterways, and communities built on suspicion and insularity. The supernatural accusation that drove Audra out as a teenager creates a social atmosphere that makes her return immediately hostile, which gives the romance that develops against this backdrop genuine friction and genuine stakes. 🌿
The cold-case structure — a sixteen-year-old disappearance that the town either can’t or won’t solve — gives the suspense element a mystery architecture that rewards close attention, while the python challenge setting provides a reason for Audra’s return that is specific enough to feel real rather than convenient. The person trying to stop her from remembering is a credible threat rather than a procedural obstacle. 🌊
What makes this gripping: A taut action-romance set deep in Florida’s Everglades, following a wildlife photographer who returns to a town that once called her a witch — determined to recover the memory of the night her father disappeared. On sale today for $2.99 — perfect for fans of Suzanne Brockmann and Cherry Adair who want their romantic suspense atmospheric, their heroines resilient, and their swamp settings genuinely atmospheric.
If I Were You: A Novel
Author: Lynn Austin
Regularly $18.99, Today $2.99
Christian Historical Fiction
1950. Audrey Clarkson arrives in America as a war widow seeking her late husband’s family — and finds her closest friend Eve Dawson has been impersonating her for four years. 1940. The same two women drove ambulances together through the London Blitz, class differences temporarily dissolved by shared terror. Lynn Austin builds her dual-timeline novel on the particular intimacy that wartime creates and the particular damage that survival leaves behind. ✈️
Austin is one of Christian historical fiction’s most skilled practitioners of the dual-timeline structure, and If I Were You uses the format with genuine purposefulness — the 1940 sections establish exactly what the friendship between upper-class Audrey and lady’s-maid’s-daughter Eve meant under fire, which is the only context that makes Eve’s decade of impersonation psychologically credible rather than inexplicably villainous. The deception, when unpacked, is more complicated than it first appears. 🌹
The London Blitz sections are rendered with the visceral authenticity that WWII historical fiction demands, and Austin’s Christian faith framework gives both women’s moral reckonings — with the deception, with the war, with their choices — a spiritual dimension that readers of the genre will find satisfying rather than didactic. The friendship-survival-identity themes are handled with care and genuine emotional intelligence. 🕊️
What makes this essential: A beautifully constructed dual-timeline Christian historical novel about two women whose wartime friendship in the London Blitz is tested by a decade of deception, impersonation, and the secrets that survival makes necessary. On sale today for $2.99 — extraordinary value for fans of Kate Quinn and Kristina McMorris who want their WWII fiction emotionally rich, their character dynamics complex, and their faith themes woven in rather than imposed.
The Girl Made of Stars: A Novel
Author: K.E. Le Veque
Regularly $5.99, Today $2.99
20th Century Historical Romance
In 1934, Lola Grayson was MGM’s biggest star — dubbed “The Siren,” a protégé of Louis B. Mayer, the original talkie sex symbol before Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow defined the era. She had everything the studio system could manufacture and almost nothing it couldn’t control. Then she made the mistake of falling in love with fellow MGM star Robert Taggart. For a major star who wanted marriage and children, that was a death sentence. ⭐
K.E. Le Veque builds the dual-timeline structure of The Girl Made of Stars on a mystery hidden inside a love story — in the present day, a struggling novelist purchases Lola and Robert’s secret Los Angeles love nest and begins uncovering a secret the old walls have been keeping for ninety years. The Golden Age Hollywood setting is rendered with the glamour and the machinery behind it, neither romanticizing the studio system nor reducing it to pure exploitation. 🎬
Le Veque’s strength as a historical romance author has always been the emotional weight she brings to period-authentic relationships, and the Lola/Robert romance carries the tragedy that Golden Age Hollywood stories demand — the collision between genuine feeling and the industrial apparatus that manufactured both of their personas. The present-day thread gives the novel a mystery engine that pulls readers forward even as the historical sections do the emotional heavy lifting. 🌹
Why this captivates from page one: A sweeping dual-timeline Hollywood romance following MGM’s greatest silent-era star, the forbidden love affair she kept hidden from the world, and the novelist who discovers ninety years later what the old walls were protecting. On sale today for $2.99 — perfect for fans of Fiona Davis and Renée Rosen who want their historical fiction glamorous, their secrets worth keeping, and their love stories genuinely heartbreaking.
The Secret Orphanage
Author: Barbara Josselsohn
Regularly $3.99, Today $1.99
Historical World War II Fiction
France, 1944. Celina arrives at her late husband’s childhood home in the occupied countryside expecting an empty stone house she can sell and leave behind. Instead she finds children — six Jewish children hidden upstairs each night, cared for by a man named Remy who took them in when no one else would. The villagers are sworn to secrecy. The mountains in the distance hide Nazi soldiers who will eventually come over them. Celina arrived first, but not by much. 🌿
Barbara Josselsohn writes WWII historical fiction with the emotional restraint that the best entries in the genre share — the horror is present in the specific details rather than in explicit description, and the moral weight of ordinary people doing extraordinary things under impossible conditions is rendered without sentimentality. The secret orphanage premise is both historically grounded and genuinely suspenseful: every page carries the knowledge that discovery means catastrophe. ✡️
Celina’s transformation from reluctant visitor to active protector is handled with enough gradual specificity to feel earned rather than convenient, and the relationship between her grief, her husband’s hidden past, and Remy’s desperate courage gives the novel an emotional complexity that pure adventure WWII fiction doesn’t always manage. The occupied French countryside setting is rendered with quiet, specific authenticity. 🕊️
What makes this essential: A moving, tautly plotted WWII novel about a grief-stricken American woman who discovers six hidden Jewish children in her late husband’s French farmhouse — and the impossible choice about whether to stay and protect them. On sale today for $1.99 — perfect for fans of Pam Jenoff and Lisa Wingate who want their wartime fiction emotionally devastating, their heroines reluctantly brave, and their secrets worth every risk taken to keep them.
Call of the Rockies Series: Books 1-3
Author: Misty M. Beller
Regularly $7.99, Today $3.99
Christian Historical Romance
Susanna Wilkins has one last journey to make before her life changes forever: retrace the Lewis and Clark route into the Rocky Mountains, fulfilling her dying father’s final dream before lung cancer takes him. Every mile matters more than the one before it. The rapids are fierce, the grizzlies are hungry, and none of that is what terrifies her most. What terrifies her most is losing her father before the journey ends. 🏔️
Misty M. Beller writes Christian historical romance with the frontier West authenticity that the genre’s best practitioners share — the Rocky Mountain setting is rendered with genuine physical specificity, from the violence of the rapids to the scale of the wilderness, and the historical detail of the early 19th-century frontier feels lived-in rather than decorative. Susanna’s grief-tinged determination gives the adventure stakes an emotional depth that pure action can’t manufacture. 🌲
Beaver Tail, the Blackfoot warrior whose path crosses Susanna’s at a mountain waterfall, is given enough interior life to make his gradual involvement feel earned rather than convenient — he has his own reasons for being where he is, his own community context, and his own resistance to the complications this white woman and her dying father represent. Beller handles the cross-cultural romance with the care and specificity it requires. 🦅
Why this captivates from page one: Three complete Christian historical romance novels following a woman’s last journey with her dying father through the Rocky Mountains — and the Blackfoot warrior whose path crosses hers at a waterfall neither of them expected. On sale today for $3.99 — extraordinary value for fans of Tracie Peterson and Karen Witemeyer who want their frontier romance adventurous, their faith themes genuine, and their love stories built on genuine mutual respect across genuine difference.
Protector of the Grove (Path of Dragons Book 1)
Author: Nicholas Searcy
Regularly $4.99, Today $2.49
Apocalypse LitRPG
Elijah Hart is dying of cancer, flying to Seattle to spend what time he has left with his sister’s family, when the World Tree extends its branches to Earth and his plane crashes into the Pacific. He wakes up on a Pacific Northwest island with magical powers he didn’t have before, a connection to the natural world that goes deeper than biology, and a game-like system that has reshaped reality around him. The technology is gone. The monsters are real. And Elijah, who came to say goodbye, is somehow still alive. 🌲
Nicholas Searcy builds his Apocalypse LitRPG on a premise that the genre’s best entries share — a protagonist whose prior-world circumstances make the apocalyptic transformation feel like an ironic gift as much as a catastrophe. A dying man gifted with druidic powers and a connection to life itself is not a subtle metaphor, but Searcy deploys it with enough narrative momentum to make the thematic weight feel earned rather than heavy. 🐉
The LitRPG system — the game-like progression mechanics, the stat screens, the skill acquisition — is integrated with enough care to satisfy genre readers without alienating newcomers, and the Pacific Northwest setting gives the nature-magic premise a specific, visually rich landscape that the druid class mythology rewards. The expanded world, with its preindustrial reversion and newly dangerous geography, is built with the kind of detail that invites extended series reading. ⚡
What makes this essential: A propulsive Apocalypse LitRPG about a terminal cancer patient who survives a magical catastrophe and discovers he’s been transformed into the last thing he expected — a druid with a reason to fight for the world he came to leave. On sale today for $2.49 — perfect for fans of Dakota Krout and Andrew Rowe who want their LitRPG emotionally grounded, their magic systems nature-based, and their protagonists fighting for something worth surviving for.
A Bend in the Road
Author: Nicholas Sparks
Regularly $3.99, Today $1.99
Small Town & Rural Fiction
Two years after his wife was killed in a hit-and-run accident, Miles Ryan is still the deputy sheriff of New Bern, North Carolina, still grieving, still trying to raise his young son Jonah, and still no closer to finding the driver who took everything from him. Then he meets Sarah Andrews — Jonah’s second-grade teacher, a young woman who moved to New Bern to recover from a difficult divorce and start over. They begin, carefully and tentatively, to fall in love. Neither of them knows yet what connects them. 💕
Nicholas Sparks writes small-town romantic fiction with the reliable emotional architecture that has made him one of the genre’s most commercially successful authors — the North Carolina setting is rendered with genuine warmth, the grief at the story’s center is handled with real empathy, and the second-chance romance between two wounded people is given enough space to feel credible rather than convenient. A Bend in the Road is mid-period Sparks at his most structurally confident. 🌊
The secret connecting Miles and Sarah — which becomes clear in the novel’s second half — is the kind of revelation that reframes everything that preceded it without feeling cheap or manipulative. Sparks earns it through the careful characterization of both protagonists, and the question of whether love can survive what they discover about each other is the emotional engine that carries the novel to its resolution. 🌅
What makes this essential: A beautifully crafted Nicholas Sparks romance about a grieving deputy sheriff, a divorced schoolteacher starting over, and the shocking secret that connects them in ways neither could have anticipated. On sale today for $1.99 — perfect for fans of Sparks who want their small-town fiction emotionally resonant, their romance built on genuine character warmth, and their secrets worth the wait.
Second Acts Vintage (Nora Blackwell)
Author: Dianne Harman
NEW RELEASE
Cozy Mystery
Nora Blackwell runs Second Acts Vintage in the charming New England town of Millbrook — a carefully curated shop where old clothes carry old stories. When the historic Ashford estate opens for liquidation, Nora finds more than exquisite 1940s pieces: her black Labrador Gatsby fixates on a navy-blue coat with unusual intensity, and inside its hidden pocket is a diary that’s been sealed for over eighty years. The coat belonged to Catherine Ashford, who died young. Her sister never let go. 🧥
Dianne Harman builds her Nora Blackwell series on a premise that cozy mystery handles with particular charm when it commits fully — the object-with-a-history as the mystery’s entry point, the amateur investigator whose specific professional expertise makes her uniquely equipped to follow the trail. A vintage shop owner who understands the emotional weight clothing carries is exactly the right person to find a hidden diary and feel obligated to act on what it contains. 🔍
The 1940s cold-case structure gives the novel a dual-timeline quality without requiring Harman to split the narrative — the past arrives through the diary, filtered through Nora’s reading and investigation, which keeps the pacing tight while delivering the period atmosphere that historical cozy readers love. Gatsby’s role as an instinctive detector of the coat’s significance is a nice touch that the genre’s animal-companion tradition will appreciate. 🐾
Why this enchants from page one: A warm, atmospheric new cozy mystery about a New England vintage shop owner whose black Lab leads her to a hidden diary — and an eighty-year-old family secret sewn into the lining of a navy coat. A new release from a cozy mystery author with a devoted readership, perfect for fans of Laura Childs and Monica Ferris who want their mysteries object-centered, their settings charming, and their protagonists genuinely passionate about what they do.
Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!
Author: Liza Minnelli
NEW RELEASE
Entertainer Biographies
Liza Minnelli decided at sixteen that sympathy was her mother’s business. She would give people joy. What that vow cost her — and what it protected her from — is the subject of a memoir that arrives with the authority of someone who has survived things that would have finished most people: Judy Garland for a mother, Vincente Minnelli for a father, a lifelong battle with substance use disorder, broken marriages, miscarriages, financial ruin, and the particular burden of being an EGOT icon who is rarely discussed without reference to her parents. 🎭
Liza has described this memoir as the story she has never told before, which is a claim celebrity autobiography makes more often than it delivers. The evidence here suggests she means it — the access to her own diaries throughout her life gives the narrative a specificity that ghostwritten celebrity autobiography typically lacks, and the willingness to sit with the self-doubt and the body image struggles alongside the cabaret triumphs marks this as something rawer than the polished performance her audiences have always received. ⭐
The EGOT framing — Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony — gives the biography a structural spine through which Minnelli traces not just the awards but the specific artistic contexts that produced them: the Bob Fosse collaborations, the Kander and Ebb years, the Liza with a Z concert film, and the long road back from physical collapse and addiction. For fans of Minnelli and of Broadway and Hollywood history, this is essential primary source material. 🎬
Why this moves and inspires: A raw, long-awaited memoir from one of entertainment’s most extraordinary figures — covering Judy Garland’s daughter, Vincente Minnelli’s daughter, and finally, bracingly, Liza Minnelli herself. A new release from a genuine legend, finally telling her own story in her own words.
To Live and Write in LA: A Street-Level Guide to Surviving as a Screenwriter
Author: Jim Agnew
NEW RELEASE
Screenwriting
Jim Agnew has written and produced multiple feature films alongside directors Dario Argento and John Carpenter and actors including Nicolas Cage, Adrien Brody, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. His guide to surviving Hollywood as a screenwriter is not a film school curriculum or a success story. It’s an insider confessional about deals that collapsed, egos that dominated, near-disasters that became the defining experiences of a career, and what it actually costs to keep making films in a business designed to chew through the people who love it most. 🎬
The distinction Agnew draws — between understanding the craft of screenwriting and understanding the business of Hollywood — is the book’s central argument, and it’s one that film school graduates consistently discover too late. The business infrastructure: how decisions get made, who actually has power, why projects die in development, what survival requires beyond talent — is the knowledge that only comes from having lived it, and Agnew has lived enough of it to fill a genuinely useful book. 📝
The name-dropping is contextual rather than decorative — Argento and Carpenter and Cage appear not as celebrity accessories but as case studies in the specific dynamics of working with directors and stars who operate at the intersection of art and commerce. For aspiring screenwriters, this is the book that tells them what’s actually waiting on the other side of the sale. 🌟
What makes this essential: A frank, street-level insider guide to Hollywood screenwriting from a career writer-producer who worked with Carpenter, Argento, and Cage — covering what film school teaches, what it misses, and what survival in the industry actually requires. A new release and indispensable reading for anyone serious about a screenwriting career who wants honest intelligence over inspirational mythology.