Important Note: This post is dated Thursday, April 4, 2012, and the titles mentioned here may remain free only until midnight PST tonight.

The Truth Doesn’t Always Set You Free

In 1987, the dirty war that will last twelve years and kill thirty thousand Peruvians finally reaches up through the Andean cloud forest for Nina and her family. Nina’s father is shot by soldiers, her mother raped, and her brother lost to the shadowy ranks of Shining Path guerrillas. And when Agustín Malqui, the village pastor, files a legal complaint against the military, it’s no surprise when he disappears in the middle of the night—just another casualty of the military regime.

Twenty-odd years later, Nina, now an officer in Cuzco’s tourist police, comes across a familiar name on the police printer that she scans daily for any trace of her long-lost brother. Agustín Malqui is alive. After spending years in a political prison, the broken pastor has been wandering the country, saving souls and drowning his demons in pisco. Nina tracks him down, only to lose him yet again in a police sweep of political malcontents. But before Malqui disappears, he tells her a drunken tale she can scarcely believe: that her brother Miguel is still alive.

Despite warnings and threats from her chief and the pleadings of her lover, an officer in Peru’s anti-terrorist branch, Nina presses on to find Malqui. Her search takes her through Peru’s underworld, from remote villages high in the Andes to the steaming jungle haunts of the narcotraficantes, and ultimately to a secret political prison in the altiplano, where she learns the truth about Malqui and her own vanished brother.

Aren’t we the good guys? Don’t Americans spend billions of dollars coming to the aid of Muslim countries when they are subject to calamities? Didn’t we save millions of Muslims from slaughter in Bosnia?
So why do so many Muslims hate us?Veteran journalist Irfan Husain points out in his important new book, Fatal Faultlines: Pakistan, Islam and the West that there are two sides to every argument. And though you may not agree with the other side it is imperative that we at least understand the mind-set of people whose hearts and mind have been lost by the West and the United States.Using personal experiences, anecdotes and history, Irfan Husain weaves a compelling and highly readable narrative that gives us a different perspective on world affairs and American involvement with the Middle East and the Muslim world.

Boston District Attorney Will Sullivan dreams of becoming the next governor of Massachusetts. With his beautiful wife, Joanna, and adorable daughter, Sydney, Will seems destined for greatness…until Sydney becomes seriously ill. Now both parents resolve to do anything to save their daughter’s life.

But in the twilight world of Briarwood Medical Center, nothing is as it seems. Patients on the brink of death are not only surviving but thriving, while others wither away…and the recoveries all revolve around the ministerings of a mysterious counselor, who takes an unsettling interest in Joanna. When Sydney’s health miraculously improves, Will suspects that Joanna has made a terrible bargain to save their child. Now Will must face a powerful, unknown evil before he loses…everything.

Eagle without Eyes

For nine-year-old Bobby and his best friend, ten-year-old Johnny, summer camp at Soaring Eagle was to be four weeks of baseball, bike racing and swimming . . . good clean, mostly predictable fun.

As it turns out, not so much. Tracking down thieves to clear their name, finding the bike saboteur that cost them a race, searching for a runaway Lakota cabin mate that might be in trouble, all the while trying to win the baseball championship, the other three bike races and surviving the dance with the girls from the neighboring camp make their time at Soaring Eagle an unforgettable adventure.

Oh, . . . along the way they save the life of a friend and rediscover the long lost Holy Terror Gold Mine, a Lakota Sacred Cave and the well-preserved body of a Shaman who died more than a century ago.

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