Today's Bestselling Free Kindle MystereBooks (130120)

Here is today's list of the Bestselling Free Kindle Crime Fiction: the top nine mysteries, novels of suspense, and thrillers.

We're using a script to embed an RSS feed from Amazon.com, which is updated hourly; as an alternative, you can click on the image to the right or use this link to see the relevant page on Amazon.com, which includes a list of both the Top 100 Paid and Top 100 Free Kindle Mysteries and Thrillers.

Rogue Justice by William Neal is Today's Fourth Featured Free MystereBook

MystereBooks is pleased to feature Rogue Justice by William Neal as today's fourth free mystery ebook (An Action Thriller; iTunes format only).

This title was listed as free as of the date and time of this post. Prices are subject to change without notice. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of purchase will be the price paid for the book. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your transaction.

For a summary of all of today's featured titles, plus any that may have appeared before and are repeat freebies, visit our Free MystereBooks page. This page is updated daily, typically by 8 AM ET.

— ♦ —

Rogue Justice
William Neal
An Action Thriller
Publisher: ePublishing Works!

Enigmatic billionaire Mitchell Chandler churns out obscene profits at his aquatic theme parks driven by the spectacular killer whale exhibits.

Then the orca at Chandler's Seattle Park dies. Now the animal rights activists have all the ammo they need to shut him down.

But Chandler has a plan: Blackmail commercial fisherman Zora Flynn into capturing a replacement whale — and use Zora's mother as bait.

Forced into the orca hunt, Zora encounters a never-before-seen species of killer whale — creatures of mind-bending size, speed, and intelligence.

As awe-struck scientists race to understand the whales' sudden appearance, Zora and Chandler come face-to-face with each other and the chilling truth: the mighty orcas have simply returned … to exact justice.

  

Important Note: This book was listed for free on the date and time of this post. Prices can and do change without prior notice. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase.

For more free mystery ebooks, visit our Free MystereBooks page.

Savage Cut by Jo Dereske is Today's Third Featured Free MystereBook

MystereBooks is pleased to feature Savage Cut by Jo Dereske as today's third free mystery ebook (A Ruby Crane Mystery; Kindle format only).

This title was listed as free as of the date and time of this post. Prices are subject to change without notice. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of purchase will be the price paid for the book. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your transaction.

For a summary of all of today's featured titles, plus any that may have appeared before and are repeat freebies, visit our Free MystereBooks page. This page is updated daily, typically by 8 AM ET.

— ♦ —

Savage Cut
Jo Dereske
A Ruby Crane Mystery
Publisher: June Creek Books

She was the prodigal daughter, returning to the Michigan hometown she'd fled in disgrace seventeen years before. But now Ruby Crane is back at her family's isolated lakeside cabin — alone except for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Jesse, who is recovering from a debilitating head injury.

Ruby's job as a forgery expert at a California detective agency is behind her now. Jesse's recovery is her priority … that and trying to ignore the rumors about her return.

  

Important Note: This book was listed for free on the date and time of this post. Prices can and do change without prior notice. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase.

For more free mystery ebooks, visit our Free MystereBooks page.

January Justice by Athol Dickson is Today's Second Featured Free MystereBook

MystereBooks is pleased to feature January Justice by Athol Dickson as today's second free mystery ebook (The Malcolm Cutter Memoirs; Kindle format only).

This title was listed as free as of the date and time of this post. Prices are subject to change without notice. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of purchase will be the price paid for the book. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your transaction.

For a summary of all of today's featured titles, plus any that may have appeared before and are repeat freebies, visit our Free MystereBooks page. This page is updated daily, typically by 8 AM ET.

— ♦ —

January Justice
Athol Dickson
The Malcolm Cutter Memoirs
Publisher: Author Author

Reeling from his wife's unsolved murder, Malcolm Cutter is just going through the motions as a chauffeur and bodyguard for Hollywood's rich and famous. Then a pair of Guatemalan tough guys offer him a job. It's an open question whether they're patriotic revolutionaries or vicious terrorists. Either way, Cutter doesn't much care … until he gets a bomb through his window, a gangland beating on the streets of L.A., and three bullets in the chest.

Now there's another murder on Cutter's mind. His own.

  

Important Note: This book was listed for free on the date and time of this post. Prices can and do change without prior notice. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase.

For more free mystery ebooks, visit our Free MystereBooks page.

Winter Kill by Nancy Steedle is Today's Featured Free MystereBook

MystereBooks is pleased to feature Winter Kill by Nancy Steedle as today's free mystery ebook (A Donovan Burke Mystery; Kindle format only).

This title was listed as free as of the date and time of this post. Prices are subject to change without notice. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of purchase will be the price paid for the book. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your transaction.

For a summary of all of today's featured titles, plus any that may have appeared before and are repeat freebies, visit our Free MystereBooks page. This page is updated daily, typically by 8 AM ET.

— ♦ —

Winter Kill
Nancy Steedle
A Donovan Burke Mystery
Publisher: Nancy Steedle

The deaths of a priest, a psychologist, and a young woman, all apparently due to natural causes, puzzle Homicide Detective Donovan Burke. Were their deaths really due to natural causes, or something more sinister?

Discovering that a bell was found beside each of the bodies, Burke searches for a connection, a search that leads him to Kristi Nelson. Are the deaths, as they seem, merely coincidence? Burke doesn't think so, but if a clever killer is roaming the streets of Des Moines, is Kristi Nelson his next victim?

As the holidays come to a close and a New Year's Eve blizzard envelops the city, it's a race against time, but time is running out for Kristi. Fleeing for her life, she races through the city's skywalks, unaware that down on the streets, the police are in a race of their own — a race to avert another winter kill.

  

Important Note: This book was listed for free on the date and time of this post. Prices can and do change without prior notice. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase.

For more free mystery ebooks, visit our Free MystereBooks page.

Review: Cathedral Windows by Clare O'Donohue

A Mysterious Review of …

Cathedral Windows by Clare O'Donohue. A Nell Fitzgerald eBook Special Mystery.

Review summary: This longish short story (at just over 60 pages) weaves together a tale of how a community pulls together for one of its own with the spirit of the Christmas holiday … though the mystery plot itself is a little thin. Still, it is very enjoyable, a story appropriate for, and within the context of, the series itself. (Click here for text of full review.)

Our rating:

Cathedral Windows
Clare O'Donohue
A Nell Fitzgerald eBook Special Mystery
Plume (November 2012)

Publisher synopsis: Christmas is just around the corner in the Hudson Valley. Nell and her friends at the Someday Quilts shop should be making eggnog and finishing up the stitching on their last homemade gifts, but when an arsonist strikes and a beloved teacher becomes a suspect, the ladies rally behind him to clear his good name. Will they succeed in time for him to spend Christmas among loved ones or will this be a chilly winter for the town of Archers Rest?

      

Today's Bestselling Free Kindle MystereBooks (130119)

Here is today's list of the Bestselling Free Kindle Crime Fiction: the top nine mysteries, novels of suspense, and thrillers.

We're using a script to embed an RSS feed from Amazon.com, which is updated hourly; as an alternative, you can click on the image to the right or use this link to see the relevant page on Amazon.com, which includes a list of both the Top 100 Paid and Top 100 Free Kindle Mysteries and Thrillers.

MystereBooks: This Week's Update of Kindle Crime Fiction Priced $2.99 or Less (130119)

Every month Amazon publishes a list of 100 Kindle books priced $3.99 or less. We thought we'd take that idea and improve on it, publishing a list of 100 Kindle mystery books priced $2.99 or less and updating it every week!

Here is our general criteria for selecting titles to include: books from major or specialty publishers of crime fiction and those written by authors familiar to us. There are far more than 100 to choose from, so we use our best judgment to narrow it down.

And just a reminder … as we add new titles, older ones are removed from the list. These books aren't likely to be repeated, so we encourage you to check in frequently!

No particularly noteworthy notes this week so so let's get to today's update!

Below are listed the new $2.99 or less titles we added either today or mentioned in separate posts earlier this week; click on the cover or title for more information or to purchase the Kindle edition.

Important Note: Prices can and do change without prior notice! We strongly urge you to confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of purchase is the price of the book.

— ♦ —

Three by Ted Dekker.

Showdown by Ted Dekker.

The Black Lyon by Jude Deveraux.

A Crack in Everything by Angela Gerst. A Susan Callisto Mystery (1st).

The Kill Clause by Gregg Hurwitz. A Tim Rackley Mystery (1st).

Deadly Search by Donna Welch Jones. A Sheriff Lexie Wolfe Mystery Novella.

Chain Thinking by Elliott Light. A Shep Harrington, Smalltown Mystery (2nd).

Comes a Horseman by Robert Liparulo.

Going Organic Can Kill You by Staci McLaughlin. A Dana Lewis, Blossom Valley Mystery (1st).

English Tea Murder by Leslie Meier. A Lucy Stone Mystery (17th).

Honeymoon For One by Beth Orsoff. A Novel of Romance and Internation Intrigue.

House by Frank Peretti.

The Black Monastery by Stav Sherez. A Novel of Suspense.

Blindsighted by Karin Slaughter. A Grant County Mystery (1st).

Kisscut by Karin Slaughter. A Grant County Mystery (2nd).

A Faint Cold Fear by Karin Slaughter. A Grant County Mystery (3rd).

— ♦ —

Important Note: Prices can and do change without prior notice! We strongly urge you to confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of purchase is the price of the book.

Please Welcome Suspense Novelist Jenny Milchman

by Jenny Milchman

We are delighted to host debut novelist Jenny Milchman as our guest while on tour with JKS Communications for her new book, Cover of Snow (Ballantine Books, January 2013 hardcover, audio and ebook formats), a novel of suspense. We encourage you to visit the other participating sites; you can find her tour schedule here.

Today Jenny writes about relics and recordings — excavating the fictional past.

— ♦ —

My debut novel, Cover of Snow, opens with a woman looking for her police detective husband. He's not in bed when she wakes up in the morning. Nora finds his body a few minutes later in another room of their old farmhouse, a victim of suicide.

Photo provided courtesy of
Jenny Milchman

Nora's hunt to find out why her husband killed himself becomes the journey of the book. She must unearth not only a recent crime, but also one that took place twenty-five years in the past, which went unsolved and unpunished.

There were challenges I didn't anticipate when writing about events from long ago. How could I make the distant past feel real to the reader?

And there were other challenges because Cover of Snow is told in the first person, almost entirely through Nora's point-of-view. Nora is an outsider in the town of Wedeskyull, where her husband was a cop. She didn't even live in the same region as the events she must investigate. Nora's sense of disorientation, of stumbling around in the dark, reflects the process of grief she is going through. Grief is a land that makes everyone a stranger.

My solution to the first difficulty — that of making the past feel alive — came in the form of a prologue, which described what happened on that January day decades before. The prologue didn't wind up in the published version of the novel, but it enabled me to feel the full extent of the tragedy that kicked off the events of the book, scaffolding that helped me to build a story. (And it will also be available as a deleted scene).

Because of Nora's outsider status, she needed skills that would enable her to hunt for clues both in the here and now and long ago. Her career as a restorer of old homes lends her this ability. In one scene, Nora notes, “You never would've known it was there. Not unless your hands were used to planing over wood all day, knowing how it lived and moved and breathed.”

But neither the prologue nor Nora's career were going to raise those dead characters from twenty-five years in the past. I didn't want to have Nora simply question people who had been there, in part because they'd have no real motivation to open up to her. I needed to find a way to bring long gone voices to life. Finally I asked myself, what if they'd been captured somehow, stilled for a moment in time?

That's when the character of the autistic Dugger Mackenzie began to take shape. Dugger lives at the periphery, watching the goings-on in town without getting involved, and committing them to film and tape and video. His path bisects with Nora's and she is able to put Dugger's relics to use, although doing so comes with a terrible cost.

In relics and recordings, Nora finds the past preserved like amber, ready to be cast into the light of the present and the secrets behind her husband's death revealed.

— ♦ —

Jenny Milchman is a suspense novelist from New Jersey whose short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Adirondack Mysteries II, and in an e-published volume called Lunch Reads. Jenny is the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day, and the chair of International Thriller Writers' Debut Authors Program.

Jenny can be reached at JennyMilchman.com or you can find her on her blog, Suspense Your Disbelief.

— ♦ —

Cover of Snow
Jenny Milchman

Waking up one wintry morning in her old farmhouse nestled in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, Nora Hamilton instantly knows that something is wrong. When her fog of sleep clears, she finds her world is suddenly, irretrievably shattered: Her husband, Brendan, has committed suicide.

The first few hours following Nora's devastating discovery pass for her in a blur of numbness and disbelief. Then, a disturbing awareness slowly settles in: Brendan left no note and gave no indication that he was contemplating taking his own life. Why would a rock-solid police officer with unwavering affection for his wife, job, and quaint hometown suddenly choose to end it all? Having spent a lifetime avoiding hard truths, Nora must now start facing them.

Unraveling her late husband's final days, Nora searches for an explanation—but finds a bewildering resistance from Brendan's best friend and partner, his fellow police officers, and his brittle mother. It quickly becomes clear to Nora that she is asking questions no one wants to answer. For beneath the soft cover of snow lies a powerful conspiracy that will stop at nothing to keep its presence unknown … and its darkest secrets hidden.

          

— ♦ —

Never Say Spy by Diane Henders is Today's Second Featured Free MystereBook

MystereBooks is pleased to feature Never Say Spy by Diane Henders as today's second free mystery ebook (The Never Say Spy Series; Kobo and iTunes formats).

This title was listed as free as of the date and time of this post. Prices are subject to change without notice. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of purchase will be the price paid for the book. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your transaction.

For a summary of all of today's featured titles, plus any that may have appeared before and are repeat freebies, visit our Free MystereBooks page. This page is updated daily, typically by 8 AM ET.

— ♦ —

Never Say Spy
Diane Henders
The Never Say Spy Series
Publisher: PEBKAC Publishing

Despite her penchant for weapons and ripe language, Aydan Kelly's resumé reads "bookkeeper", not "badass". She's leaving the city to fulfill her dream of rural tranquillity when she gets carjacked by a man who shouldn't exist.

When RCMP officer John Kane kills her would-be abductor, Aydan thinks her troubles are over. But Kane's investigation implicates her in an international espionage plot, and criminal charges become the least of her worries when she's targeted by the very spies Kane suspects her of aiding.

Pity her enemies. Because nobody's tougher than a middle-aged woman who wants her dream back.

    

Important Note: This book was listed for free on the date and time of this post. Prices can and do change without prior notice. Please confirm the price of the book before completing your purchase.

For more free mystery ebooks, visit our Free MystereBooks page.