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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Important Note: This post is dated Thursday, April 5, 2012, and the titles mentioned here may remain free only until midnight PST tonight.

In his fourth award-winning book, Christopher Meeks offers a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel. A young Minnesotan, Edward, is blessed with an abundance of “experience”–first when his mother dies and next when his father, an encyclopedia salesman, shoehorns Edward into a private boys school where he’s tortured and groomed. He needs a place in the universe, but he wants an understanding of women.

Edward stumbles into romance in high school, careens through dorm life in college, whirls into a tornado of love problems as a mini-mart owner in a trailer park in Alabama, and aims for a film career in Los Angeles.

In nine chapters, the reader experiences Edward’s life from ages 14 to 45. This novel follows Meeks’s highly acclaimed collections of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea and Months and Seasons.

Carmela Ciuraru wrote in the Los Angeles Times Book Review of Meeks’s first book, “This idea resonates throughout the collection: Meeks’s characters seek happiness in the small things because they have no choice … [The stories] are poignant and wise, sympathetic to the everyday struggles these characters face.”

Author and humorist Sandra Tsing Loh has said, “Christopher Meeks’s quirky stories are lyrical and wonderfully human. Enjoy.”

From award winning author Brett Battles comes the new Jonathan Quinn thriller BECOMING QUINN.

Most careers begin with an interview and a handshake. Others require a little … something more.

Meet Jake Oliver. The day will come when he’s one of the best cleaners in the business, a man skilled at making bodies disappear.

At the moment, however, he’s a twenty-two year old rookie cop, unaware his life is about to change.

In a burning barn a body is found–and the fire isn’t the cause of death. The detectives working the case have a pretty good idea about what went down.

But Officer Oliver thinks it’s something else entirely, and pursues a truth others would prefer remain hidden–others who will go to extreme lengths to keep him quiet.

Every identity has an origin. This is Quinn’s.

BECOMING QUINN includes the bonus first chapter to WATCH ME DIE by Lee Goldberg.

hirteen-year-old Alice Parker knows something isn’t right; mysterious aches and pains, a craving for sugar that’s out of control. Suddenly she is top of the class in every subject.

Baffled by what is happening to her and feeling at odds with the world, Alice can’t take much more. Only when she collapses and experiences a life-changing transformation does she discover why she is different.

But this new, incredible identity brings its own challenges and Alice isn’t convinced she can rise to them. She just wants to be normal!

The fact is she’s anything but…

“Never again attempt to develop this kind of technology.”

It is with these words that an unknown alien attacker destroys the Earth cities of Tehran, Sydney and Beijing. Fifty million people die… and nothing is ever the same again.

Some call them Demons, some call them Aliens, but to Chinese Naval Captain Melissa Liao… they are the enemy. She is given command of one of three great warships built to fight the “demons”, the TFR Beijing.

Her task is simple. Find who attacked Earth and why… then stop them.

Book one of the Lacuna series.