Mystery Bestsellers for the Week Ending September 06, 2014

A list of the top 15 Mystery Hardcover Bestsellers for the week ending September 6th, 2014 has been posted by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books.

Last week's featured title, The Long Way Home by Louise Penny, takes over the top spot this week.

Three new titles enter the list this week; debut position in [brackets].

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[8]: Personal
Lee Child
— The Jack Reacher Series (19th)

Someone has taken a shot at the president of France in the City of Light. The bullet was American. The distance between the gunman and the target was exceptional. How many snipers can shoot from three-quarters of a mile with total confidence? Very few, but John Kott — an American marksman gone bad — is one of them. And after fifteen years in prison, he's out, unaccounted for, and likely drawing a bead on a G-8 summit packed with enough world leaders to tempt any assassin.

If anyone can stop Kott, it's the man who beat him before: Reacher. And though he'd rather work alone, Reacher is teamed with Casey Nice, a rookie analyst who keeps her cool with Zoloft. But they're facing a rough road, full of ruthless mobsters, Serbian thugs, close calls, double-crosses — and no backup if they're caught. All the while Reacher can't stop thinking about the woman he once failed to save. But he won't let that that happen again. Not this time. Not Nice.

Reacher never gets too close. But now a killer is making it personal.

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[10]: The Secret Place
Tana French
— The Dublin Murder Squad Series (5th)

The photo on the card shows a boy who was found murdered, a year ago, on the grounds of a girls' boarding school in the leafy suburbs of Dublin. The caption says, I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.

Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to get a foot in the door of Dublin's Murder Squad — and one morning, sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey brings him this photo. "The Secret Place," a board where the girls at St. Kilda's School can pin up their secrets anonymously, is normally a mishmash of gossip and covert cruelty, but today someone has used it to reignite the stalled investigation into the murder of handsome, popular Chris Harper. Stephen joins forces with the abrasive Detective Antoinette Conway to find out who and why.

But everything they discover leads them back to Holly's close-knit group of friends and their fierce enemies, a rival clique — and to the tangled web of relationships that bound all the girls to Chris Harper. Every step in their direction turns up the pressure. Antoinette Conway is already suspicious of Stephen's links to the Mackey family. St. Kilda's will go a long way to keep murder outside their walls. Holly's father, Detective Frank Mackey, is circling, ready to pounce if any of the new evidence points toward his daughter. And the private underworld of teenage girls can be more mysterious and more dangerous than either of the detectives imagined.

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[14]: Murder 101
Faye Kellerman
— The Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus Series (22nd)

As a detective lieutenant with the LAPD, Peter Decker witnessed enough ugliness and chaos for a lifetime. Now he and his spirited wife, Rina Lazarus, are ready to enjoy the quiet beauty of upstate New York, where they can be closer to their four adult children, grandchildren, and their foster son, Gabe.

But working for the Greenbury Police Department isn't as fulfilling as Decker hoped. While Rina has adapted beautifully to their new surroundings, Decker is underwhelmed and frustrated by his new partner, Tyler McAdams, a former Harvard student and young buck with a bad attitude. Just when he thinks he's made a mistake, Decker is called to an actual crime — a possible break-in at the local cemetery.

The call seems like a false alarm until it's discovered that a mausoleum's stunning Tiffany panels have been replaced by forgeries. Soon the case escalates into murder: a co-ed at an exclusive consortium of liberal-arts colleges is brutally slaughtered. Poking into the hallowed halls of academia to find a killer, Decker and McAdams are drawn deep into a web of nasty secrets, cold-case crimes, international intrigue, and ruthless people who kill for sport.

Suddenly Decker's job is anything but boring, and the case might be too much to handle for a sleepy town that hasn't seen a murder for nearly a quarter century. Decker will need to use every bit of his keen mind, his thirty years of experience as a homicide cop, and much-appreciated help from family and old friends to stop a callous killer and uncover a cabal so bizarre that it defies logic.

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Enter to Win — Plagues of Eden by Sharon Linnéa and B.K. Sherer

Omnimystery News invites you to Enter to Win a copy of Plagues of Eden by Sharon Linnéa and B.K. Sherer, courtesy of Arundel Publishing.

One (1) winner will receive a copy of …

Title: Plagues of Eden
Author: Sharon Linnéa and B.K. Sherer
Series: An Eden Thriller
Publisher: Arundel Publishing
Format: Trade Paperback
List Price: $9.95

Use the form below to submit your entry. One entry per person; US residents only. Entry period ends Saturday, September 13, 2014. (If you cannot see the entry form, use this link.)

Synopsis: Tel-Al-Balamum, Egypt. The dig of an ancient temple is decimated by fiery hail from the heavens. And that's only the beginning.

Buenos Aires. Paris. West Point. The countdown has begun.

Only Army Chaplain Jaime Richards, along with rock star Mark Shepard, can stop the catastrophe and save the mysterious Sword 23 from the clutches of a psychopath … if they can find the true mastermind in time.

— Plagues of Eden by Sharon Linnéa and B.K. Sherer

Please Welcome Crime Novelist Christopher Meeks

with Christopher Meeks

We are delighted to welcome mystery author Christopher Meeks to Omnimystery News today.

Chris's new crime thriller is A Death in Vegas (White Whisker Books; July 2014 trade paperback and ebook formats).

We asked Chris what led him to write books in our favorite genre, and he titles his guest post for us today "Why Crime?".

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Photo provided courtesy of
Christopher Meeks

My wife loves watching bludgeoning shows. This is our term for real-crime series such as 20/20, 48 Hours, and Dateline. Their stories, more times than not, cover serial killers or one spouse knocking off the other for profit or for the love of another.

For instance, a wife wants to divorce her husband, and then she doesn't pick up the kids after work one night. Days later, her body, cut into sections, floats to the top of a lake in garbage bags. Her husband says, "I was playing basketball with buddies. They can vouch for me." It turns out that when he went to the bathroom, he zipped off and killed her. So much real-life crime is depressing. Yet I write crime books.

Why crime? I began with short stories, moved into literary fiction, and now with Blood Drama and A Death in Vegas, I'm focusing on bad people doing very bad things. Why? And why don't I like bludgeoning shows?

The real-crime stories can be interesting, but the stories of bad marriages for me quickly became cliché. The husband or wife typically wants a) to cash in on a huge life insurance policy or b) wants to avoid a divorce because the surviving spouse will get the kids, split half an expensive estate, or both.

The motives for serial killers are rarely clear. A hatred of women? A sexual dysfunction? A twisted interpretation of the Bible? In novels, motivation is demanded, but real-life stories often don't sort it out. That makes for an unsatisfying drama. Also, a lot of these shows are simply out to prove that forensic science is amazing.

The crime novel genre's popularity cannot be denied. My mother, my wife, and my father-in-law all have all been voracious readers of mysteries and thrillers, not because they have an interest in law enforcement but because as stories, the drama can be intense. Often, a time element is involved. If so-and-so isn't caught, he'll kill again. The protagonist's life is at stake when confronting the killer or other antagonist. Questions need answering such as who did it and why?

I didn't fall into this because the genre is popular but because I ran out of personal experiences worth examining. After all, many of my short stories and first two novels were based on crazy things from my life. The Brightest Moon of the Century, for instance, was based in part on my moving from Los Angeles to an Alabama trailer park much out of curiosity. What's the South like? It became quite colorful.

I also teach fiction writing to college students, and traditional story structure demands four essential things: 1) a clear protagonist who has 2) a need or desire, and 3) something or someone stands in his way. 4) The stakes should be high. This works for all genres, but crime books as page-turners make these things crystal clear. When I ran out of personal stories, the challenge of this genre appealed to me. I could create a situation, and, like a huge puzzle, figure it out.

This doesn't mean I don't have a personal connection to the story. I always look for ways to connect my experiences. Blood Drama began, for instance, when I corrected my student papers nearly every day at a Starbucks in the lobby of a South Pasadena bank. One day it struck me: what if there were a robbery and I was taken hostage in a getaway?

A Death in Vegas was inspired by a couple I knew who had a beneficial bug company, and I visited their booth once at a Las Vegas convention. I saw models selling all sorts of things in booths and thought if my friends hired a model, she'd have to be a sexy lady bug. What if she turned up dead? Where?

I don't take the genre lightly. I ask people what they're reading, and sometimes I hear "Just a dumb mystery," said as if it's a guilty pleasure. They seem to be saying, "I should be reading literature, but this book is fun." I don't see the genre as dumb. My short stories have often had ordinary people in extraordinary situations, and my sense of absurdity sometimes slips through. My style fits crime.

Even though my mother had been an avid reader of mysteries in particular, I didn't get into it until I came across Raymond Chandler on my own. First, I liked seeing old Los Angeles where there had been bean fields and oil derricks on the way to Santa Monica. The other reason was that Chandler wasn't so much concerned about plot but enmeshed in character and theme, the very things that interested me. When I hit the end of The Big Sleep, and even though there seemed to be no reason for a chauffeur driving off of a pier, I was in awe. I raced through his other books. He showed me the genre was what you made of it.

I've since come to be enamored of novels by Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Patricia Cornwell, and a few others. My wife loves Lisa Gardner, too. A friend introduced me to a new author, John Lansing, whose The Devil's Necktie simply grabs. So did another novel by a newcomer, The Crack-Up by Eric Christopherson.

Over the years, I've come to see ordinary people mess up big time. They can be friendly but nice people who do terrible things. I love exploring the moral gray areas this shows. Crime can make it clear.

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Christopher Meeks writes stories that have a unique twist all his own. Whether short fiction, a drama, or his novels, each story, while serious, is layered with the odd. He teaches English and fiction writing at Santa Monica College, and Children’s Literature at the Art Center College of Design.

For more information about the author, please visit his website at ChrisMeeks.com or find him on Facebook and Twitter.

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A Death in Vegas
Christopher Meeks
A Crime Thriller

The president of BenBugs, a company that specializes in beneficial bugs for organic gardening, discovers a young woman dead in his Las Vegas hotel suite. She had worked as a sexy lady bug at his convention booth — and he had nothing to do with her death.

While that's being investigated, the FBI raids his booth on a money-laundering scam that he knows nothing about, either. Soon, the coroner doesn't have good news. The police and FBI are against him — and his wife cannot be found. He flees to find the answers.

    

When Nothing Else Was Right by Carol Costa is Today's Third Featured Free MystereBook

Omnimystery News is pleased to feature …

When Nothing Else Was Right by Carol Costa

A Dana Sloan Mystery

Publisher: Open Books Press

… as today's third free mystery ebook. This is a repeat freebie that was last featured on our site on July 03, 2012.

  

This title was listed for free as of September 06, 2014 at 7:20 AM ET. Prices are subject to change without notice. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of the 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.

More on today's free book, below.

Dana Sloan's investigation into the disappearance of a talented singer, who has run off with money belonging to the mob, is sidetracked when the girl's husband confesses to killing her. The confession is a lie and the case quickly becomes a dangerous web of deceptions and related crimes.

Identity theft, murder, and an attempt on Dana's life send her across the country to find the missing girl before the mob catches up with her. For once, investigative reporter Sloan and her boyfriend, Detective Al Bruno, are working a case together, and uncover new evidence that heals a family torn apart by tragedy nineteen years earlier.

— When Nothing Else Was Right by Carol Costa

Dream Queen by Betsy Thornton is Today's Second Featured Free MystereBook

Omnimystery News is pleased to feature …

Dream Queen by Betsy Thornton

A Chloe Newcombe Prequel Mystery

Publisher: Mango & Pat

… as today's second free mystery ebook.

  

This title was listed for free as of September 06, 2014 at 7:10 AM ET. Prices are subject to change without notice. The price displayed on the vendor website at the time of the 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.

More on today's free book, below.

Chloe Newcombe arrives in Arizona from New York City to see her bad boy brother Danny and his new girl friend Kristi who live in Dudley. They stop at a restaurant in a small town on the way to Dudley and Danny disappears, nowhere to be found. Frustrated Chloe and Kristi continue on to Dudley, but the next day Kristi disappears too.

Chloe begins a search for her brother and for answers that take her deep into a past that changes the way she thinks about everything.

— Dream Queen by Betsy Thornton