Kindle Genre Watch: New in Mystery Fiction (04 October 2010)

Spend less time searching for new genre fiction and more time reading it as I watch for newly-released genre fiction in the Kindle Store so you don't have to. Recent genre fiction releases in mystery and thriller fiction include:

Worth Dying For: A Reacher Novel by Lee Child. Delacorte Press. Print length: 400 p. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"There's deadly trouble in the corn country of Nebraska...and Jack Reacher walks right into it. First he falls foul of the Duncans, a local clan that has terrified an entire county into submission. But it's the unsolved case of a missing child, already decades-old, that Reacher can't let go. The Duncans want Reacher gone - and it's not just past secrets they're trying to hide. They're awaiting a secret shipment that's already late - and they have the kind of customers no one can afford to annoy. For as dangerous as the Duncans are, they're just the bottom of a criminal food chain stretching halfway around the world. For Reacher, it would have made much more sense to keep on going, to put some distance between himself and the hard-core trouble that's bearing down on him. For Reacher, that was also impossible." - http://www.randomhouse.com
This is Child's fifteenth thriller to feature lone wolf Jack Reacher, the guy you'd most like to have watching our back in any dangerous situation. If you haven't read any of the Reacher novels, check out my earlier post on the series.

Naked Heat by Richard Castle. Hyperion. Print length: 304 p. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"When New York' s most vicious gossip columnist, Cassidy Towne, is found dead, Heat uncovers a gallery of high profile suspects, all with compelling motives for killing the most feared muckraker in Manhattan. Heat's murder investigation is complicated by her surprise reunion with superstar magazine journalist Jameson Rook. In the wake of their recent breakup, Nikki would rather not deal with their raw emotional baggage. But the handsome, wise-cracking Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's personal involvement in the case forces her to team up with Rook anyway. The residue of their unresolved romantic conflict and crackling sexual tension fills the air as Heat and Rook embark on a search for a killer among celebrities and mobsters, singers and hookers, pro athletes and shamed politicians." - Amazon.
"Richard Castle" is prominently featured in the popular ABC series Castle.

Early Warning by Michael Walsh. Pinnacle Books. Print length: 360 p. Kindle edition $4.39. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"The NSA's most lethal weapon is back. Code-named Devlin, he operates in the darkest recesses of the US government. When international cyber-terrorists allow a deadly and cunning band of radical insurgents to breach the highest levels of national security, Devlin must take down an enemy bent on destroying America - an enemy more violent and ruthless than the world has ever known." - Publisher.

The Embroidered Corpse by Brian Kavanagh. BeWrite Books. Print length: Kindle edition $5.95. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Two startling murders that replicate the death of a mediaeval English king and the discovery of a mysterious ancient tapestry lead Belinda Lawrence and her associate Hazel Whitby into a vortex of suspense involving a bizarre religious cult, an enigmatic academic, a group of monks devoted to aggression and clues to a thrilling conspiracy nearly a thousand years old. Are the Godwins, self-proclaimed spiritual leaders, really devoted to their religious group? Is Sir Gerald Taylor, revered university don, as benign as he appears? What is the origin of the puzzling tapestry discovered in the old country house?" - Amazon.
This is volume two of The Belinda Lawrence Murder Mystery series, following Capable of Murder. It was first published in 2006 and is now available for Kindle readers.

The Bishop by Steven James. Revell. Print length: 523 p. Kindle edition $9.11. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"FBI Special Agent Patrick Bowers's cutting-edge 21st-century geospatial investigative techniques and impeccable logic have helped him track some of the country's most grisly killers. This time it's a congressman's daughter who is found dead even as her killers launch a spree of perfect murders in the Northeast. With nothing to link the crimes to each other, Agent Bowers faces his most difficult case yet - even as his personal life begins to crumble around him. Known for his intricately woven, masterfully plotted novels of high-octane action and spine-tingling suspense, Steven James delivers once again. The Bishop is a gripping, adrenaline-laced story for readers who are tired of timid thrillers. Strap on your seatbelt and get ready for a wild ride. The game is on." - Amazon.
This is book four in the Patrick Bowers Files series that began with The Pawn.

Captive by Megan Lisa Jones. Polimedia Publishing. Print length: 397 p. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Khalil, an Al Qaeda operative, is held in American captivity after being seized evaluating the location for a possible bombing in London. George, a psychology professor on leave to work as an interrogator, is charged with extracting any information Khalil may know. Mean-while Omar, a graduate student in Los Angeles, is painstakingly planning a series of bombs to detonate across the United States. Khalil was to lead this mission; but his disappearance doesn't slow down the plot. Can the plot succeed with its mastermind imprisoned? Each man must face his own limitations as they are tested by circumstance and their own past decisions." - Publisher.

Murder Can Be Funny: The Stanley Hastings Mysteries for the Kindle

Publishers are beginning to convert more and more of their slightly older titles - books published B.K. (before Kindle) - from paper to electronic form. That is good news for Kindle readers because these books normally cost less than new releases and many are old favorites that their fans want to read again on the Kindle. In this category are the adventures of Stanley Hastings, Private Eye, a series of fourteen books published from 1987 to 2010 and written by Parnell Hall. Eight are now available in Kindle editions with more on the way.

Stanley Hastings is an unlikely private detective. He doesn't carry a gun, is scrupulous about avoiding fist fights and has only his gift of repartee to defend himself, but somehow - at times in spite of himself - he gets the bad guys (or gals, as the case may be). If you like your murder mysteries with a Marxian flare - Groucho, that is, check out:

Actor. Parnell Hall, c1993. Print length: 273 p. Kindle edition: $2.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Having interviewed people with broken legs and photographed holes in the sidewalks for 20 years, Stanley has nearly forgotten that he was an aspiring actor before he took up detecting. He's overjoyed when an old theater chum asks him to step into a production of Shaw's Arms and the Man in the wilds of Connecticut just two short days before opening. There he runs afoul of a persnickety stage manager and the arrogant no-talent, soap opera-trained star and gets to share a dressing room with a young actress of few inhibitions. When the stage manager is stabbed to death, Stanley must call on his real-life skills to extricate himself from the role of leading suspect." - Publishers Weekly.

Blackmail. Parnell Hall, c1994. Print length: 278 p. Kindle edition $2.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"New York private eye Stanley Hastings earns the lion's share of his income taking statements in personal-injury suits. Despite misgivings, he takes on a blackmail case. Actually, it starts out as more of a messenger job, since his client, Marlena, just wants him to deliver a package of money to a man who has some pictures. Well, one thing leads to another, and Marlena turns up dead, prompting an NYPD cop to finger Stanley for either withholding information or the murder itself. Soon there's another dead woman and a link to a former porno star married to a cop." - Booklist.

Movie. Parnell Hall, c1995. Print length: 280 p. Kindle edition $2.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"New York City private eye Stanley Hastings plays against type. He's happily married, dislikes the PI business, and wants to be something else . . . like a screenwriter. That's why he's so excited when his courtroom drama catches the eye of filmmaker Sid Garfellow, who hires Stanley to write the screenplay for a martial-arts action flick. The low-budget production gets off to a rocky start when a homeless man is found beaten to death on the set." - Booklist.

Trial. Parnell Hall, c1996. Print length: 311 p. Kindle edition $2.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"...Stanley Hastings is back, assisting sleazy personal-injury attorney Richard Rosenberg as he prepares to defend his first murder suspect. Anson Carbinder is accused of killing his wife, but he claims he was in an all-night poker game at the time of the murder. The other six men at the game will substantiate his alibi, but as Hastings digs into this story (which includes an ingenious clue), his doubts begin to multiply." - George Needham for Booklist.

Scam. Parnell Hall, c1997. Print length: 309 p. Kindle edition $2.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
Stanley Hastings client is lying to him. But that's a mere annoyance. The crooked cop framing him for three murders is a problem.
"What Mr. Hall does to the private-eye formula is very funny, but it is not frivolous. His puzzles, for all their manic nonsense, are fiendish constructions of sound logic." - Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review.

Suspense. Parnell, c1998. Print length: Kindle edition $2.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Stanley Hastings, bodyguard? Come on, he doesn't even carry a gun. But a best-selling suspense writer's wife who is getting threatening phone calls hires Stanley to make them stop. Bad move. The fact the calls continue is the least of her worries." - Amazon.

Hitman. Pegasus, c20007. Print length: 272 p. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Private eye Stanley Hastings doesn't want for idiosyncrasies, as fans of this long-running 'unconventional' and 'very funny' (says the New York Times) mystery series know. For instance, he doesn't carry a gun. So he seems a particularly improbable choice, among all of New York City's private investigators, for the cold-eyed Martin Kessler. Not that Kessler requires firepower. He's got a gun of his own - an automatic with a long, ugly silencer - although he'd like to retire it. A contract killer who wants out of the game, Kessler hires Stanley mostly to watch his back in the event that someone of similar professional skills is shadowing him. Someone is, in fact, only Stanley fails to spot him and dead bodies are soon piling messily up. The hapless Stanley thus begins an odyssey around Manhattan in his attempt to uncover just what did go down..." - Amazon.

Caper. Pegasus, c2010. Print length: 256 p. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"New York private investigator Stanley Hastings needs a change of pace. The only jobs his boss, personal-injury lawyer Richard Rosenberg, gives him are routine trip-and-fall cases. So when a beautiful woman comes to Stanley and asks him to rescue her teenage daughter, Stanley's knight-errant genes kick into overdrive. Mom thinks daughter may be turning tricks. OMG! Stanley first tries the "scared straight" technique he remembers from an old movie. It doesn't go well..." - Wes Lukowsky for Booklist.

If you've yet to sample Parnell Hall's Stanley Hastings mysteries, he may convince you to give them a try with his catchy music video The King of Kindle. Looks like until recently Hall was republishing his own works for the Kindle at a very reasonable price and to his credit, all are available with the text-to-speech feature enabled.

A Week of Entertainment: Kindle Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly's Oct 1st Issue

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the October 1st issue include:

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, by David Sedaris. Little, Brown and Company. Print length: 176 p. FICTION. EW's slant: "...the humorist, long a droll chronicler of human foibles, turns his absurdist wit and opposable thumbs to fables of the feathered and four-legged....toxic little treats, fun-sized Snickers bars with a nougaty strychnine center." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Featuring David Sedaris's unique blend of hilarity and heart, this new collection of keen-eyed animal-themed tales is an utter delight. Though the characters may not be human, the situations in these stories bear an uncanny resemblance to the insanity of everyday life. In The Toad, the Turtle, and the Duck, three strangers commiserate about animal bureaucracy while waiting in a complaint line. In Hello Kitty, a cynical feline struggles to sit through his prison-mandated AA meetings. In The Squirrel and the Chipmunk, a pair of star-crossed lovers is separated by prejudiced family members." - Amazon.

By Nightfall, by Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Print length: 256 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "There are sentences here so powerfully precise and beautiful that they almost hover above the page." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Peter and his wife, Rebecca - who edits a mid-level art magazine - have settled into a comfortable life in Manhattan's art world, but their staid existence is disrupted by the arrival of Rebecca's much younger brother, Ethan - known as Mizzy, short for 'The Mistake.' Family golden child Mizzy is a recovering drug addict whose current whim has landed him in New York where he wants to pursue a career in 'the arts.' Watching Mizzy - whose resemblance to a younger Rebecca unnerves Peter - coast through life without responsibilities makes Peter question his own choices and wonder if it's more than Mizzy's freedom that he covets. Cunningham's sentences are, individually, something to behold, but they're unfortunately pressed into the service of a dud story about a well-off New Yorker's existential crisis." - Publishers Weekly.

Nashville Chrome, by Rick Bass. Houghton Mifflin. Print length: 272 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...sweeps you along just as the real-life Browns' music once carried away listeners." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (1 review). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Late in 1959, the Brown siblings - Maxine, Bonnie, and Jim Ed - were enjoying unprecedented international success, rivaled only by their longtime friend Elvis Presley. They had a bona fide megahit on their hands, which topped both the country and pop charts and gave rise to the polished sound of the multibillion dollar country music industry we know today. Mesmerized by the Browns' haunting harmonies, the Beatles even tried to learn their secret. Their unique harmony, however, was only achievable through shared blood, and the trio's perfect pitch was honed by a childhood spent listening for the elusive pulse and tone of an impeccably tempered blade at their parent's Arkansas sawmill. But the Browns' celebrity couldn't survive the world changing around them, and the bonds of family began to fray along with the fame. Heartbreakingly, the novel jumps between the Browns' promising past and the present, which finds Maxine - once supremely confident and ravenous in her pursuit of applause - ailing and alone. As her world increasingly narrows, her hunger for just one more chance to secure her legacy only grows, as does her need for human connection. Lyrical and nuanced, Nashville Chrome hits all the right grace notes with its vivid evocation of an era in American music, while at its heart it is a wrenching meditation on the complexities of fame and of one family - forgotten yet utterly unforgettable when reclaimed by Bass - who experienced them firsthand." - Amazon.

C, by Tom McCarthy. Publisher. Print length: 320 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...experimental new work...reads like W. Somerset Maugham tweaked to a frenetic and distorted frequency." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (22 reviews). Kindle edition $14.27. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up amid the noise and silence with his brilliant but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that stays with him as he heads off into an equally troubled larger world. After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he escapes. Back in London, he's recruited for a mission to Cairo on behalf of the shadowy Empire Wireless Chain. All of which eventually carries Serge to a fitful - and perhaps fateful - climax at the bottom of an Egyptian tomb..." - Amazon.
"Each chapter of McCarthy's tour de force is a cryptic, ornate puzzle box, rich with correspondences and emphatically detailed digressions. Ambitious readers will be eager to revisit this endlessly interpretive world, while more casual readers will marvel at the high-flying picaresque perched at the crossroads of science and the stuff dreams are made of." - Publishers Weekly.

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey. Doubleday. Print length: 336 p. NONFICTION. EW's slant: "...delivers a thrill so intense you may never get in a boat again." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (25 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Casey, O Magazine editor-in-chief, travels across the world and into the past to confront the largest waves the oceans have to offer. This dangerous water includes rogue waves south of Africa, storm-born giants near Hawaii, and the biggest wave ever recorded, a 1,740 foot-high wall of wave (taller than one and a third Empire State Buildings) that blasted the Alaska coastline in 1958. Casey follows big-wave surfers in their often suicidal attempts to tackle monsters made of H2O, and also interviews scientists exploring the danger that global warning will bring us more and larger waves. Casey writes compellingly of the threat and beauty of the ocean at its most dangerous... [and] ...smoothly translates the science of her subject into engaging prose." - Publishers Weekly.

NEW IN PAPERBACK AND KINDLE EDITIONS:

The Art of Disappearing, by Ivy Pochoda. St. Martin's Press. Print length: 320 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...beguiling debut." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (16 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"When Mel Snow meets the talented magician Toby Warring in a dusty roadside bar, she is instantly drawn to the brilliant performer whose hands can effortlessly pull stray saltshakers and poker chips from thin air and conjure castles out of the desert sands. Just two days later they are married, beginning their life together in the shadow of Las Vegas, where Toby hopes to make it big. Mel knows that magicians are a dime a dozen, but Toby is different—his magic is real. As Toby's renown grows and Mel falls more and more in love with his wonderments, she starts to realize that Toby's powers are as unstable as they are dazzling...

Bicycle Diaries, by David Byrne. Penguin. Print length: 320 p. NONFICTION. EW's slant: "...gently zingy..." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (34 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Urban bicycling has become more popular than ever as recession-strapped, climate-conscious city dwellers reinvent basic transportation. In this wide-ranging memoir, artist/musician David Byrne - who has relied on a bike to get around New York City since the early 1980s - relates his adventures as he pedals through and engages with some of the world's major cities. From Buenos Aires to Berlin, he meets a range of people both famous and ordinary, shares his thoughts on art, fashion, music, globalization, and the ways that many places are becoming more bike-friendly....an adventure on two wheels conveyed with humor, curiosity, and humanity." - Amazon.

A Week at the Airport, by Alain De Botton. Vintage. Print length: 112 p. NONFICTION. EW's slant: "One of our most influential essayist and thinkers indulges his somewhat freakish love of airports..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $9.69. Text-to-Speech: Disabled. Please note: This title has complex layouts and has been optimized for reading on Kindle DX's or Kindle for PC's larger screen, but can still be viewed on other devices.
"Given unprecedented access to one of the world's busiest airports as a 'writer-in-residence,' Alain de Botton found it to be a showcase for many of the major crosscurrents of the modern world - from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our global interconnectedness to our romanticizing of the exotic. He met travelers from all over and spoke with everyone from baggage handlers to pilots to the airport chaplain. Weaving together these conversations and his own observations - of everything from the poetry of room service menus to the eerie silence in the middle of the runway at midnight - de Botton has produced an extraordinary meditation on a place that most of us never slow down enough to see clearly." - from the Trade Paperback editionn.