📚 Free today: puppets in the walls, a hitman's conscience, and Emmeline Pankhurst 📚
Twelve free reads spanning romantic comedy, paranormal FBI, cozy mystery, psychological thriller, suffragette memoir, and one very haunted Maine B&B.
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Weekend Wife (Sassy in the City Book 1)
Author: Erin McCarthy
FREE
Romantic Comedy
An out-of-work actress lands what should be the simplest job in the world: pose as Grant Caldwell the Third’s fiancée for one fancy weekend in the Hamptons. Designer clothes, champagne, a billionaire who turns out to be unexpectedly charming beneath all the pretension — how hard could it be? The hard part, it turns out, is keeping this strictly professional when Grant is sexy and bossy and surprisingly sweet in ways his family absolutely is not. 🥂
Erin McCarthy builds the Sassy in the City series on the fake-relationship premise that romantic comedy executes most entertainingly when the actress hired for the role is the last person who should be catching real feelings — she knows better than anyone how to perform emotions, which makes it considerably more alarming when she can’t tell anymore whether she’s performing. The Hamptons setting delivers everything the premise promises: wealth, pretension, and maximum opportunity for things to go wrong. 💍
The dynamic between Grant and his pretentious family gives the comedy its texture — Grant is the rare good one, the anomaly in a world of people who take themselves far too seriously, and watching the actress notice that while trying very hard not to notice it drives the romantic tension with satisfying efficiency. McCarthy writes banter that earns its laughs without losing the warmth underneath. 😂
What makes this irresistible: A fizzy, laugh-out-loud romantic comedy about an actress hired to fake-fiancée her way through a Hamptons weekend — and the billionaire who turns out to be considerably harder to fake feelings for than advertised. Free today — perfect for fans of Sophie Kinsella and Christina Lauren who want their rom-coms bubbly, their heroes surprisingly sweet, and their fake relationships gloriously unconvincing.
Kingdoms at War (Dragon Gate Book 1)
Author: Lindsay Buroker
FREE
Sword & Sorcery Fantasy
Jak is a cartography student with a straightforward dream: find the lost dragon gate, step through it, and map what’s on the other side. Becoming a wizard is emphatically not part of the plan. In a world where wizards rule from sky cities and keep most of humanity enslaved, the last thing Jak wants is to become one of them. Then he and his archaeologist mother unearth the gate — and the wizards they’ve spent their lives avoiding take immediate notice. 🗺️
Lindsay Buroker builds the Dragon Gate series on the portal fantasy framework with a protagonist whose specific skills — observation, cartography, making sense of unknown terrain — turn out to be exactly what the situation requires. Jak’s developing magical powers are unwanted and inconvenient and arrive at the worst possible time, which is considerably more interesting than a hero who discovers his abilities and immediately embraces them. The sky city rulers don’t debate threats. They send assassins. 🐉
The dynamic between Jak’s determination to stay uninvolved and the escalating impossibility of that position gives the series opener its propulsive energy — every step toward understanding the gate and his own powers is also a step deeper into a conflict that the wizard rulers have spent centuries ensuring no one can win. The world-building is efficient and specific, delivered through action rather than exposition. ⚔️
Why this grips from page one: A propulsive sword-and-sorcery adventure about a cartography student who unearths the legendary dragon gate and accidentally inherits the magical powers that make him the greatest threat the wizard rulers have ever seen. Free today — perfect for fans of Brandon Sanderson and Michael J. Sullivan who want their fantasy epic in scope, their heroes reluctantly chosen, and their magic systems with genuine consequences.
Ian Bragg Omnibus 1-3
Author: Craig Martelle
FREE
Action Thriller Fiction
Ian Bragg is a hitman with a conscience — a distinction that matters more than it might initially sound. The world produces a reliable supply of scumbags who create problems for people who can’t solve those problems through legitimate channels. Ian solves them. He is good at this, discreet about it, and at peace with what it requires — until he meets a woman with sparkling green eyes, and the carefully maintained separation between his professional life and any other kind of life stops holding. 🎯
Craig Martelle builds the Ian Bragg series on the action thriller’s most durable tension: the operative who wants something normal and operates in a world that actively punishes that want. The omnibus collects the first three novels, which means three complete story arcs for a single free download — three escalations of the central problem of a man determined to have both the career that can never be discussed and the personal life that would be destroyed by it. 💥
Martelle writes action fiction with the pacing and moral clarity of someone who understands that a hitman protagonist works best when the targets are unambiguously deserving and the complications come from everything else — the relationships, the exposure risk, a world that has its own plans regardless of what Ian wants. The omnibus format rewards readers who want to commit to a series from the start. 🌑
What makes this essential: Three complete action thrillers in one free download, following Ian Bragg — a hitman with a code, a conscience, and a personal life that his very particular career is determined to complicate. Free today — perfect for fans of Lee Child and Vince Flynn who want their action fiction fast, their protagonists operating in moral gray zones, and their page counts substantial.
The Accidental Fiancé (Love Lottery Book 1)
Author: Christi Barth
FREE
Workplace Romance
Alex Kirkland pooled money with his sister and their best friends to enter a lottery for a historic, dilapidated inn on the Maryland shore — a long shot at escape from circumstances that had run out of other options. They won. Now the group is moving in, rolling up their sleeves, and racing to get the place ready for spring wedding season. Sydney Darrow, meanwhile, has returned to her hometown for ninety days — a temporary sacrifice she can absolutely endure — when her grandmother mistakes a handsome stranger for the fictional fiancé Sydney invented during a health scare. 💍
Christi Barth builds the Love Lottery series on the fake-relationship premise with a setup that earns its complications honestly — Sydney’s lie wasn’t malicious, it was desperate, and the grandmother she invented it for is still in treatment, which makes unwinding it feel impossible. Alex agreeing to play along is either a kindness or the beginning of something considerably more difficult to manage. The inn renovation backdrop gives the romance a shared project to work around and through. 🏚️
The push-pull between Sydney’s ninety-day exit plan and the life that keeps making itself more interesting to stay for drives the central tension with the warm, low-stakes energy that workplace romance does best — two people who are professionally adjacent, personally inconvenient for each other, and entirely unable to maintain the emotional distance the situation technically requires. 🌊
Why this charms from page one: A warm, witty workplace romance about a grandmother’s mistaken identity, a fake fiancé who turns out to be a very real complication, and a crumbling Maryland inn that might be the fresh start neither of them planned for. Free today — perfect for fans of Jill Shalvis and Susan Mallery who want their romance small-town warm, their fake relationships sweetly tangled, and their happily-ever-afters genuinely earned.
I Found Puppets Living in My Apartment Walls
Author: Ben Farthing
FREE
Horror Suspense
Johnny wakes up to find a puppet looming over his bed. He recognizes it — the furry monster from R-City Street, the beloved children’s television show his grandfather puppeteered for years. Grandpa went missing a year ago. He disappeared from this very building, which was converted from the old R-City Street studio. The puppet shouldn’t be here. And yet here it is, and it seems to want Johnny to follow it into the walls. 🎭
Ben Farthing builds this horror novel on a premise that works because it weaponizes something genuinely unsettling — the gap between the comforting childhood associations of a beloved puppet and the wrong, deeply wrong feeling of finding one watching you sleep. The apartment building converted from a children’s TV studio is the kind of specific, layered setting that horror fiction uses most effectively: familiar enough to seem safe, specific enough to feel real, and layered with exactly the kind of history that tends to go bad in the dark. 😨
The labyrinth inside the walls — puppet-infested, ever deeper, pulling Johnny further from anything normal — gives the novel its structure and its escalating dread. Farthing understands that the scariest horror isn’t the monster at the end but the progressive discovery that the world you thought you understood has been hiding something enormous just behind the drywall. Johnny’s love for his grandfather is the emotional engine that makes following the puppet feel like the only possible choice. 🌑
What makes this essential: A genuinely unsettling horror novel about a man who follows a childhood TV puppet into the walls of his apartment building — and discovers a labyrinth that goes far deeper than the architecture should allow. Free today — perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay and Josh Malerman who want their horror conceptually original, their settings claustrophobic, and their dread built from something that should have been harmless.
In His Shadow
Author: Maria Frankland
FREE
Psychological Thrillers
Standing outside the registry office on her wedding day, she already knows something is wrong. Hugh won’t speak to her. Won’t look at her. Her gut is sending signals she is choosing not to receive — because the alternative is returning to the loneliness of the past year, to the death of her parents and the partner who walked out after a decade. She needs this. So she goes ahead. And Hugh disappears on their wedding night. 💍
Maria Frankland builds In His Shadow on the psychological thriller’s most effective foundation: a protagonist whose emotional vulnerability is rendered with enough honesty that the reader understands every bad decision even while dreading where it leads. The first-person voice is intimate and increasingly unreliable in the specific way that domestic suspense uses best — not deceiving the reader so much as revealing, piece by piece, how thoroughly she has been deceiving herself. 🌑
The detail that she forgives him — that despite the abandoned wedding night, the police calls, the hospitals, she finds a way back — is where Frankland demonstrates what separates literary psychological thriller from pure plot machinery. The mechanics of coercive control are rendered from the inside, in real time, which is considerably more disturbing than any external account of the same events would be. 😰
Why this grips from page one: A deeply unsettling psychological thriller told from inside a marriage that is wrong from the first moment — following a woman whose loneliness makes her the perfect target and whose first-person voice makes every red flag visible to the reader long before it becomes visible to her. Free today — perfect for fans of Liane Moriarty and Lisa Jewell who want their domestic suspense claustrophobic, their narrators genuinely compelling, and their revelations genuinely earned.
My Own Story
Author: Emmeline Pankhurst
FREE
Biographies of Social Activists
Emmeline Pankhurst became a suffragette at fourteen. By the time the fight was won, she had been arrested more times than most activists experience in a lifetime, survived hunger strikes, built and led the most confrontational women’s rights movement Britain had ever seen, and watched a cause she gave everything to finally, irreversibly succeed. My Own Story is her account of all of it — told in her own voice, with the directness of someone who never had much patience for the polite version. ✊
Born in Manchester in 1858, Pankhurst developed a philosophy of militant direct action at a time when suffragettes were expected to petition quietly and wait. She didn’t. The Women’s Social and Political Union under her leadership broke windows, chained themselves to railings, went on hunger strike in prison, and forced a movement that had been politely ignored for decades onto the front pages and into the political conversation. By 1927 she would stand for parliament herself. 📜
The memoir is both a historical document and a genuinely compelling piece of political writing — the arguments Pankhurst makes for why peaceful protest had failed and more confrontational tactics were morally necessary remain as sharp as when she made them. The book served as the basis for the award-winning film Suffragette, with Meryl Streep in the role of Pankhurst, but the source material is considerably richer than any adaptation. 🕊️
What makes this essential: The autobiography of Emmeline Pankhurst — the most influential leader of the British suffragette movement — covering organization, outrage, hunger strikes, and the dogged campaign that ultimately won women the right to vote, told entirely in her own unflinching words. Free today and genuinely essential reading for anyone interested in political history, activism, or what it actually takes to change the world.
The Ghostly Grounds: Murder and Breakfast (Canine Casper Book 1)
Author: Sophie Love
FREE
Cozy Animal Mystery
Marie Fortune is thirty-nine, a successful Boston dog groomer who has had her fill of wealthy clients and their pampered animals, and ready for something entirely different. A coastal Maine town where she spent fond childhood summers sounds like exactly the right change — until her great-aunt’s inheritance turns out to be a dilapidated historic house on a hill overlooking the harbor, and the locals unanimously advise her to walk away. Marie feels a connection she can’t explain. She decides to renovate. 🐾
Sophie Love builds the Canine Casper series on the cozy mystery formula with two additions that distinguish it from the standard setup: the house is haunted, and the dog the great-aunt also left behind is not a typical dog. Both facts become relevant in short order when an unexpected death occurs and the investigation that follows turns out to be considerably more than idle curiosity — Marie’s entire future at the B&B she is betting everything on may depend on solving it. 🏚️
The Maine coastal setting does exactly what cozy mystery settings are supposed to do — small community, scenic harbor, an ensemble of locals with strong opinions about the newcomer and her renovation project — and Love populates it with enough specific characters to make the place feel inhabited rather than atmospheric backdrop. The haunted house and mysterious dog give the series its supernatural edge without tipping into horror. 🌊
Why this delights from page one: A charming cozy animal mystery about a Boston dog groomer who inherits a haunted Maine harbor house and a very unusual dog — and finds herself solving a murder before she can finish the renovation. Free today — perfect for fans of Donna Andrews and Rita Mae Brown who want their cozy mysteries atmospheric, their animal companions genuinely peculiar, and their amateur sleuths with real stakes in the outcome.
Under Dark Skies (NightShade Forensic FBI Files Book 1)
Author: A.J. Scudiere
FREE
Werewolves & Shifters Suspense
Eleri Eames thought her FBI career ended when her last case got her committed for psychiatric evaluation. When she’s offered a second chance with the secret NightShade division, she takes it without asking too many questions — which turns out to be appropriate, because NightShade doesn’t answer many questions. Her new partner is hiding something significant. So is the division itself. And their first case involves a charismatic cult leader and a high-profile kidnapping that nothing in Eleri’s standard training prepared her for. 🔦
A.J. Scudiere builds the NightShade Forensic FBI Files on the premise that the Bureau’s most unusual cases require agents with unusual abilities — and that the line between hunter and hunted gets complicated when the hunters are supernatural themselves. Donovan Heath left a career as a sought-after medical examiner because his uncanny abilities were attracting attention he couldn’t afford. NightShade offered a solution. Whether it actually is one depends on whether Eleri figures out what he is before he decides whether to trust her. 🐺
The dual-POV structure — alternating between Eleri’s perspective and Donovan’s — gives the novel its central tension, building two characters who are each concealing something the other needs to know, thrown together on a case that requires them to function as a unit before they’ve resolved whether they can trust each other. Scudiere sustains the paranormal mystery atmosphere without sacrificing the procedural credibility. 🌑
What makes this essential: A smart, atmospheric paranormal FBI thriller about two agents with secrets — one barely holding onto her career, one hiding what he is from everyone — thrown together in a secret division where the supernatural isn’t an anomaly but a job requirement. Free today — perfect for fans of Patricia Briggs and Kelley Armstrong who want their paranormal fiction procedurally grounded, their partnerships built on genuine tension, and their FBI divisions genuinely strange.
We Did This Once Before
Author: Lynne M. Spreen
FREE
Friendship Fiction
Divorced, broke, and holding on by her fingernails, middle-aged Kim gets an invitation from her elderly mother to come back to the Florida island where she grew up. It sounds like a fresh start: Mom’s company, room to breathe, the dream business she’s always imagined. What she finds instead is a household in crisis — an aunt with dementia who has moved in, a falling-apart house, and a cousin living in a backyard trailer with a drug-dealing boyfriend. Mom didn’t mention any of this. Mom never does. 🌴
Lynne M. Spreen writes women’s fiction with the specific emotional texture of the caregiver’s dilemma — the person who keeps being the one who shows up, who knows the cost of showing up, and who comes back anyway because the alternative is knowing she didn’t. Kim’s fury at being tricked into the rescue is rendered honestly and without judgment, which makes the novel considerably more interesting than a straightforward story about a daughter choosing family over self. 💙
The family secrets that surface as Kim settles in give the narrative its structural depth — the Florida island that seemed like an escape from her problems turns out to be the place where the older, more complicated problems have been waiting. The tension between what Kim owes her family and what she owes herself is never resolved cheaply, and Spreen earns whatever conclusions she reaches. 🌊
Why this resonates from page one: A warm, emotionally honest women’s fiction novel about a woman who comes back to her Florida hometown for a fresh start and finds her mother’s household in crisis — navigating caregiving, codependency, and the question of how much one person can give before saving herself becomes the only option left. Free today — perfect for fans of Kristin Hannah and Ann Napolitano who want their women’s fiction emotionally layered, their family dynamics recognizably messy, and their protagonists genuinely tested.
Her Heart’s Precious Legacy (Where the West Meets the Heart)
Author: Carol Colyer
FREE
Western & Frontier Romance
Isabella Montgomery has no intention of marrying the man her ruthless father has chosen for her. She flees — from the sinister Marcus Blackwood, from the arranged future waiting for her at home — and finds refuge in an old cabin belonging to a cowboy named Ethan Cooper. Ethan wasn’t expecting company. He wasn’t expecting to care about whoever showed up. The feud between the Montgomerys and the Blackwoods has been running long enough to leave its mark on him too. 🤠
Carol Colyer builds the Where the West Meets the Heart series on the frontier romance foundation that the genre executes most satisfyingly when both protagonists have genuine reasons to keep their distance and genuine reasons they can’t maintain it. Ethan’s haunted past and thirst for justice give him a complexity beyond the standard protective cowboy role, and Isabella’s determination to control her own destiny makes her more than a woman in need of rescue — she’s someone building something, not just escaping something. 🌾
The slow deepening of the unlikely friendship into something neither of them planned for is handled with the patient build that western romance readers come for — the frontier setting creates natural proximity and natural danger in equal measure, and Colyer uses both to generate the kind of tension that makes the eventual emotional payoff feel genuinely earned. 🏔️
What makes this captivating: A sweeping western frontier romance about a woman who flees an arranged marriage and finds refuge — and something she wasn’t looking for — with a cowboy whose own wounds make him the last person who should be falling for a runaway. Free today — perfect for fans of Tracie Peterson and Lauraine Snelling who want their frontier romance atmospheric, their heroines determined, and their cowboys carrying just enough damage to make the love story matter.
Bound for Murder: A Hardcover Homicide (Juliet Page Book 1)
Author: Audrey Shine
FREE
Cozy Mystery
Juliet Page has spent her career surrounded by mystery novels, and she is perfectly aware of the difference between reading about murders and being involved in one. When she travels to a small UK town looking for a fresh start, she lands in the middle of a crime scene with all the evidence pointing directly at her. As a librarian, she has read enough of these to know that the prime suspect who didn’t do it has a limited window to prove it. 📚
Audrey Shine builds the Juliet Page series on the cozy mystery’s most reliable setup — the fish-out-of-water protagonist in a tight-knit community where everyone has history and nobody quite trusts a newcomer — with the added layer of a heroine whose professional familiarity with the genre makes her simultaneously well-prepared and entirely unprepared for the reality. Juliet has catalogued hundreds of fictional detectives. Being one turns out to feel different from the inside. 🔎
The stakes are personal in the specific way that gives cozy mystery its emotional foundation — this isn’t civic duty or idle curiosity but self-preservation, with new friendships and a second chance at life both hanging on whether Juliet can clear her name before the wrong conclusion becomes permanent. The UK small-town setting delivers the charming, close-knit atmosphere the genre promises. 🫖
Why this captivates from page one: A delightful cozy mystery about a librarian who travels to a small UK town for a fresh start and immediately becomes the prime suspect in a murder — forced to use everything she’s learned from a lifetime of mystery novels to solve the real thing. Free today — perfect for fans of MC Beaton and Agatha Christie who want their cozy mysteries bookish, their heroines resourceful, and their English village settings irresistibly atmospheric.
Munich Wolf
Author: Rory Clements
Regularly $5.99, Today $1.99
Military Thriller
Munich, 1935. The Bavarian capital draws young, aristocratic Britons who come for the language, the lakes, and the beer cellars — and manage not to notice, or choose not to see, the brutal machinery of the movement that considers this city its spiritual home. When a high-born English girl is murdered, Detective Sebastian Wolff is ordered to solve the case. Hitler himself is taking an interest. 🍺
Rory Clements builds Munich Wolf on the particular tension of a protagonist who is morally clear in a world that punishes clarity — Wolff despises the party he is required to work alongside, and every step of the investigation brings him closer to a confrontation with power he cannot afford to lose. The secret police are watching him. His own son, a fervent Hitler Youth member, has become a threat under his own roof. 🕵️
When the investigation points toward the highest reaches of the Nazi hierarchy, the case transforms from dangerous to potentially fatal. Clements renders 1935 Munich with the specific, menacing atmosphere of a city in the process of becoming something monstrous — the casual brutality just beneath the surface of ordinary life, the social pressure to look away, the particular terror of a system that can make a detective disappear for asking the wrong question. 🌑
What makes this essential: A taut, atmospherically brilliant Nazi-era thriller set in 1935 Munich, featuring a detective who must solve a politically explosive murder while navigating a regime that would rather he didn’t — a Sunday Times bestseller on sale today for $1.99, perfect for fans of Philip Kerr and Robert Harris who want their historical thrillers morally complex, their settings genuinely menacing, and their protagonists walking the finest of lines.
The Aviator’s Lady (Ladies of the Wilderness)
Author: Gabrielle Meyer
Regularly $5.99, Today $2.99
Historical World War I Fiction
Two timelines, half a century apart, bound by the choices made in the Minnesota wilderness. In 1863, Matthew Merrick arrives to oversee a pivotal land treaty and finds his ambitions colliding with those of a fierce rival — and his heart captured by the daughter of an Ojibwe chief. The consequences of that collision will echo forward for generations. In 1917, with the world at war, stunt pilot Cade Bailey returns to northern Minnesota seeking redemption, and heiress Emma Merrick risks everything she has for the freedom she’s always been denied. ✈️
Gabrielle Meyer builds the Ladies of the Wilderness series on the dual-timeline structure that historical fiction uses most effectively when the past and present illuminate each other — the choices made in 1863 cast a long shadow over 1917, and Meyer traces that shadow with the care of a writer who understands that generational consequences are more interesting than coincidence. The Minnesota wilderness setting gives both timelines a specific, physically demanding texture that indoor historical fiction can’t replicate. 🌲
Emma’s determination to train as a Red Cross nurse and learn to fly — in a world that has very clear ideas about what heiresses are permitted to want — is rendered with enough period-specific friction to feel genuinely costly rather than merely romantic. The WWI backdrop gives her ambitions an urgency that peacetime stories about women seeking independence often lack. 🕊️
Why this captivates from page one: A sweeping dual-timeline historical novel spanning the Minnesota wilderness of 1863 and the WWI homefront of 1917 — connecting two generations through the choices, rivalries, and loves that shape a family’s destiny across half a century. On sale today for $2.99 — perfect for fans of Kristina McMorris and Kate Quinn who want their historical fiction multigenerational, their settings vivid, and their heroines worth following across the decades.
Pearl in the Sand
Author: Tessa Afshar
Regularly $12.99, Today $3.99
Christian Historical Fiction
Rahab’s house is built into the wall of Jericho — the wall that protects the city, and the wall that will eventually come down. But other walls surround her too: the walls of a life defined by shame, rejection, and the certainty that she is beyond the reach of love or redemption. Years of pain have convinced her that her past disqualifies her from any future worth having. The Bible’s answer to that conviction is, shockingly, no. 🌿
Tessa Afshar’s Pearl in the Sand takes one of Scripture’s most surprising figures — Rahab the Canaanite, named in the lineage of Christ — and builds a full human story around the woman behind the biblical account. The 10th anniversary edition includes new features that deepen the reader’s engagement with a narrative that has resonated with readers for a decade, and the novel’s central question remains as potent as ever: what does redemption actually feel like from the inside? 📜
The marriage at the story’s heart is not a romance in the conventional sense — it is a union between two people whose wounds make genuine intimacy seem impossible, a man of faith whose pride is its own kind of wall, and a woman whose past has taught her not to expect anything good. Afshar works through that collision with the patience and emotional intelligence that biblical historical fiction requires when it takes its source material seriously. 🕊️
What makes this essential: A beautifully written, deeply felt Christian historical novel retelling the story of Rahab — from outcast to redeemed, from a wall in Jericho to a place in the lineage of kings. The 10th anniversary edition on sale today for $3.99 — perfect for fans of Francine Rivers and Bodie Thoene who want their biblical fiction emotionally rich, their characters genuinely human, and their faith journeys honestly told.
The Doctor from Nowhere (Book 1)
Author: Anatoly Drozdov
Regularly $5.99, Today $2.99
Historical Fantasy Fiction
Russian army doctor Igor Ivanov survives a fatal mine explosion — and wakes up in late 1914, in an alternate timeline where World War I is already consuming Europe and his home country is lurching toward catastrophe. Igor does what he has always done: he starts saving people. The difference is that he’s doing it with a century of medical knowledge that his new colleagues cannot begin to explain, treating conditions they haven’t diagnosed yet with techniques that look, from the outside, like something close to magic. ⚕️
Anatoly Drozdov builds his progression fantasy series on the premise that the most useful person in a historical crisis isn’t a soldier or a politician but a doctor — someone whose knowledge translates directly into lives saved, whose skills climb steadily as the stakes escalate, and whose understanding of how this war ends gives him a specific, terrible advantage over everyone around him. The 21st-century combat experience is a useful bonus. 🏥
The social climbing element — Igor making connections, earning trust, accumulating influence — gives the novel a second engine alongside the medical drama, and Drozdov uses both to drive toward the series’ central ambition: one man, armed with knowledge the past doesn’t have, attempting to change the course of world history before the worst of it arrives. The alternate WWI setting is rendered with enough historical specificity to ground the fantasy premise in something that feels real. 🌍
Why this grips from page one: A compulsively readable historical progression fantasy about a modern Russian army doctor stranded in 1914 — using 21st-century medical knowledge and combat skills to climb the social ladder and rewrite a history he already knows ends badly. On sale today for $2.99 — perfect for fans of Eric Flint and S.M. Stirling who want their alternate history grounded, their protagonists practically skilled, and their timelines genuinely at stake.
Webb of Deception (A Carter Webb Thriller Book 1)
Author: Joe Lopa
Regularly $3.99, Today $1.99
Private Investigator Mysteries
Carter Webb left the detective force with a troubled past he hasn’t finished sorting through and set up as a private investigator in Southlake — which turns out to be exactly the wrong place to try to keep your head down. A serial killer is working the city, each murder more disturbing than the last, and the pattern has a way of surfacing Webb’s personal demons at precisely the moments when he needs to think clearly. 🔍
Joe Lopa builds the Carter Webb series on the private investigator tradition that works best when the investigator’s inner life is as complicated as the case — Webb isn’t simply hunting a killer but navigating the gray territory between justice and vengeance, between the professional obligation to find the truth and the personal history that makes this particular truth dangerous for him to pursue. The Southlake setting gives the investigation a specific urban texture that grounds the psychological suspense. 🌆
The serial killer’s escalating pattern gives the thriller its urgency, and Lopa uses Webb’s compromised position — too close to the case, too aware of what it might cost him — to generate the kind of sustained tension that character-driven PI fiction produces when it commits fully to the protagonist’s vulnerability. Webb is smart enough to see what’s coming and damaged enough that seeing it doesn’t necessarily help. 🌑
What makes this essential: A psychologically intense private investigator thriller pitting a troubled ex-detective against a Southlake serial killer — a case that forces Webb to walk the razor’s edge between professional judgment and personal demons. On sale today for $1.99 — perfect for fans of Michael Connelly and John Sandford who want their PI fiction action-driven, their investigators genuinely flawed, and their killers worth the hunt.
The Galway Mysteries Books 1-8
Author: David Pearson
Regularly $4.99, Today $2.49
Noir Crime
The west of Ireland is wild, windswept, and full of secrets that small communities keep for generations. When murder arrives in this rugged landscape — a body on a storm-lashed bog road, a mysterious escort with powerful clients found dead — Detective Sergeant Maureen Lyons and Inspector Mick Hays are the ones who have to find out why. In a place where everyone knows everyone and no one tells the Guards everything, justice is rarely straightforward. ☘️
David Pearson’s Galway Mysteries series has built its readership on a combination that Irish crime fiction does particularly well — the close-knit community setting where secrets have deep roots, the detective partnership that carries its own interpersonal texture, and a landscape that is genuinely atmospheric rather than merely picturesque. Mist-covered mountains, coastal villages, back alleys, and grand hotels all feature across the eight cases collected here. 🌊
The box set format means eight complete mysteries for a single purchase price — eight investigations spanning Galway’s darkest corners, each one a standalone case and each one building the reader’s investment in Lyons and Hays as a partnership worth following. Pearson writes with the pacing of someone who understands that Irish noir’s pleasures are both atmospheric and procedural, and he delivers both across every case in the collection. 🏔️
Why this captivates from page one: Eight complete Irish noir mysteries set in the wild west of Ireland, following Detective Sergeant Maureen Lyons and Inspector Mick Hays through Galway’s most disturbing cases — from bog road bodies to high-society murders. On sale today for $2.49 — extraordinary value for fans of Tana French and Elly Griffiths who want their crime fiction atmospheric, their Irish settings authentic, and their detective partnerships genuinely compelling.
Role Play (Off the Books Book 1)
Author: Kay Cove
Regularly $5.99, Today $2.99
Romantic Comedy
An indie romance author who has published more books than she can count and still hasn’t broken through decides to invest in a marketing guru who promises to fix everything. The frantic search for “book boyfriend material” ends at a bar, where she accidentally spends her entire budget on an escort named Forrest — a charming single dad by day, considerably more complicated by night. Before she can demand a refund, he points out what she’s actually missing: inspiration. 📚
Kay Cove writes romantic comedy with the meta-awareness that the genre handles most entertainingly when the protagonist is herself a romance author — the tropes Forrest proposes acting out (brooding billionaires, masked men, small-town cowboys, all of it) are both the research and the joke, and Cove deploys them with the knowing affection of someone who loves the genre she’s gently ribbing. The three-month arrangement gives the novel its structure and its slow-burn engine. 💋
The complications arrive on schedule: the red flags that are hard to ignore, the single dad situation that makes everything more complicated, and the increasingly blurred line between performance and something neither of them planned for. Cove handles the shift from comedy to genuine feeling with enough lightness to preserve the fun and enough honesty to make the eventual emotional payoff land. 😂
What makes this irresistible: A wickedly funny romantic comedy about a struggling romance author who accidentally hires an escort as her muse — and spends three months acting out every genre trope with a man who is either the worst idea she’s ever had or the best. On sale today for $2.99 — perfect for fans of Helen Hoang and Talia Hibbert who want their romantic comedy self-aware, their banter sharp, and their slow burns worth every chapter of the setup.
The Wolf vs the Dragon (The Hidden City Supernatural Sleuth)
Author: Lauretta Hignett
Regularly $4.99, Today $2.49
Werewolf & Shifter Thrillers
Betrayal, in Myf’s experience, doesn’t sting — it is something considerably worse than that, something that goes all the way down. She has found someone to blame for hers, focused all her pain on a single target, and is now very deliberately making that target’s existence difficult. The target in question — the narrator, and very much on the receiving end of Myf’s fury — did not want to hurt her. Whether that matters is the question the novel keeps circling. 🐺
Lauretta Hignett builds the Hidden City Supernatural Sleuth series on the paranormal romance and urban fantasy combination that the shifter thriller genre does most effectively when it commits to character — the supernatural elements are the framework, but the emotional engine is the specific, personal damage that Myf and her reluctant adversary are carrying into every encounter. The “she wants to destroy me and I can’t entirely blame her” dynamic is a strong foundation for a series, and Hignett executes it with wit and genuine feeling. 🔥
The Hidden City setting gives the series its world-building backbone — a supernatural community operating beneath or alongside the ordinary one, with its own politics, its own rules, and its own particular complications for two people who are on opposite sides of a wound that hasn’t healed. The sleuth element adds investigative structure to what might otherwise be pure paranormal romance, giving readers both the emotional pull and the plot engine. 🌆
Why this captivates from page one: A sharp, emotionally charged paranormal thriller about a werewolf investigator on the receiving end of a dragon’s very focused, very personal vendetta — and the complicated history that explains why she’s not entirely wrong. On sale today for $2.49 — perfect for fans of Ilona Andrews and Patricia Briggs who want their shifter fiction funny, their supernatural world-building inventive, and their enemies-to-lovers tension genuinely electric.
The General’s Gold (The Turner and Mosley Files Book 1)
Author: LynDee Walker and Bruce Robert Coffin
Regularly $4.99, Today $2.49
Mystery Action Fiction
Mark Hawkins is found dead in a seedy motel — an apparent overdose, case closed. Billionaire computer genius Avery Turner is not satisfied with that verdict. Hawkins was her old friend, and he was on the trail of the legendary General’s Gold when he died. Avery is going to find what he was looking for. She enlists Carter Mosley, a deep-sea shipwreck diver turned social media sensation with an adrenaline problem and exactly the skills the search requires. 🏆
LynDee Walker and Bruce Robert Coffin build the Turner and Mosley Files on the action-adventure treasure hunt format that fiction handles most entertainingly when the protagonists are genuinely mismatched and the obstacles are genuinely dangerous. The route from Florida to Maine to the mountains of Virginia to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean generates enough geographic variety to keep the momentum high, and the adversaries — treacherous gangs, man-eating sharks, a world of double-crosses — match the ambition of the treasure itself. 🦈
The partnership dynamic between Avery and Carter is the series’ real engine — the billionaire with resources and determination paired with the diver with skills and instincts, each one essential to what the other can’t do alone. Walker and Coffin, both established thriller writers in their own right, bring complementary strengths to the collaboration, and the result has the pacing of a novel written by two people who know exactly how to keep pages turning. 🗺️
What makes this essential: A high-octane treasure hunt thriller following a billionaire tech genius and an adrenaline-junkie deep-sea diver from Florida to the Atlantic — hunting legendary gold, dodging deadly adversaries, and untangling a conspiracy that begins with one suspicious death. On sale today for $2.49 — perfect for fans of Clive Cussler and Steve Berry who want their adventure fiction fast, their locations varied, and their treasure worth every risk taken to find it.
Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln
Author: Matthew Pinsker
NEW RELEASE
American Civil War Biographies
We know Lincoln as the eloquent, compassionate leader who held a fractured nation together through its worst crisis. Matthew Pinsker argues that this portrait, while true, is incomplete. Behind the marble icon was something the mythology tends to obscure: a brilliant, battle-hardened party politician who had been navigating the rough-and-tumble of Illinois electioneering since the 1830s, and who brought every lesson from those decades to the presidency when it mattered most. 🎩
Boss Lincoln draws extensively on Lincoln’s private correspondence to reconstruct the decision-maker behind the public orations — shrewd and insistent, capable of deft manipulation or blunt intimidation depending on what the moment required, attentive to detail and deeply trusting of his own judgment. In cabinet meetings, Lincoln had the final say and his aides knew it. He kept careful handwritten tallies of party turnout. He gifted one to Mary Todd during their courtship, recognizing a fellow partisan. 📜
The argument Pinsker makes is that Lincoln’s mastery of coalition-building — the political infrastructure he spent decades constructing — was not incidental to emancipation and Union victory but foundational to both. The Emancipation Proclamation did not emerge from moral clarity alone; it emerged from a man who understood how to build and maintain the political conditions that made it possible. That Lincoln is the subject of this book. 🏛️
What makes this essential: A groundbreaking new Lincoln biography that moves beyond the icon to reveal the consummate party politician whose decades of coalition-building made emancipation and Union victory possible — told through private correspondence that brings the man behind the myth into sharp focus. A new release from a leading Lincoln scholar, essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how Lincoln actually worked.
Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life
Author: Dr. Gillian Sandstrom
NEW RELEASE
Communication & Social Skills
Loneliness is now recognized as a social health crisis, and the standard advice — build deeper relationships, invest in your closest connections — while sensible, misses something. Dr. Gillian Sandstrom, a psychology professor and preeminent researcher in the science of kindness, has spent years studying a different phenomenon: the small, unremarkable interactions with strangers that most people discount entirely. Her finding is that these interactions matter far more than we think. 🤝
Once Upon a Stranger builds its case on research that has repeatedly surprised people who assumed they already understood their own social lives — the barista you chat with, the neighbor you nod to, the person next to you on the train. These interactions, Sandstrom demonstrates, generate measurable improvements in happiness, wellbeing, and sense of connection. They reduce anxiety. They expand the social circles we don’t even realize we’re building. In an age of increasing polarization, they may be one of the few remaining spaces where the walls between people genuinely dissolve. 💬
The practical guidance Sandstrom offers is accessible enough for the avowedly introverted and the genuinely anxious — this is not a book about becoming someone else but about noticing what’s already available. The science is robust and the implications are larger than the modest subject matter initially suggests: small talk, done with any degree of genuine attention, turns out to be one of the most consistently underrated tools for a better life. ☀️
Why this matters: A transformative new guide from a leading psychology researcher revealing the science behind why talking to strangers — really talking, not just tolerating them — is one of the most reliable paths to more joy, less anxiety, and a richer sense of human connection. A new release that may permanently change how you think about the person standing next to you in line.
Bottom Shelf: How a Forgotten Brand of Bourbon Saved One Man’s Life
Author: Fred Minnick
NEW RELEASE
Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals
Before Fred Minnick became one of the most influential voices in American whiskey — the reviewer whose assessments move markets, whose palate shapes trends — he was a combat veteran quietly wrestling with the invisible wounds of war. What began as a personal ritual, exploring taste and sensation as a way to calm a mind that wouldn’t settle, became a path back to himself. Bourbon, specifically, gave him something to focus on when focus was hard to find. 🥃
The story takes a sharp turn when Minnick casually names a dusty 1969 bottle of Old Crow as his all-time favorite in an interview. The market responds immediately and dramatically: prices jump from $40 to $3,000 overnight. The reaction sends Minnick down a rabbit hole that becomes the book’s central mystery — Old Crow was once revered by presidents, poets, and distillers, a bourbon with genuine American lineage, and somewhere along the way it was stripped of its legacy and banished to the bottom shelf. Why? 🔍
Minnick pursues that question with the obsessive attention he brings to everything he reviews, and what he finds is a story about the American spirits industry, the economics of brand degradation, and the gap between a product’s history and its current reputation. It is also, woven throughout, a memoir about what it means to find something worth caring about when caring feels impossible. 📖
What makes this essential: A rich, surprising new memoir from America’s most influential bourbon critic — covering combat trauma, an unlikely recovery through whiskey, and the detective work behind one of the industry’s great unresolved mysteries: what really happened to Old Crow? A new release that is both a personal story and a piece of genuinely fascinating American business history.