DAILY DEALS: From the honky-tonks to the Berlin Wall
Good Time Bad Boy by Sonya Clark $ 0.99
From the Jacket Copy:
Wade Sheppard was the king of country for nearly ten years. Now he can’t get Nashville on the phone, much less another record deal. When yet another drunken night onstage gets him fired from a casino gig, Wade is pulled off the road by his manager and sent home. Being back in the small town where he was born and raised, his every screw-up fodder for gossip, isn’t helping any. His family knows him too well, and the pretty, sharp-tongued waitress who catches his eye doesn’t want to know him at all.
Daisy McNeil has more baggage than most her age but she’s finally pulling her life together. College classes will be her ticket out of poverty and instability. She doesn’t mind waiting tables for the time being, but she could do without the rowdy rednecks who sometimes get handsy. When one of them crosses the line, she snaps and gives him and his stupid ten gallon hat the telling off he deserves, but causing a scene gets her fired.
Wade didn’t mean to cost Daisy her job. Chastened, he decides he doesn’t want his train wreck of a life to crash into anybody else. He offers the bar owner a summer of free shows if Daisy can have her job back. Now they’re spending nights together trading barbs and fighting a growing attraction. With a sexy smile and a powerful voice that can make any song his, Wade’s determined to show Daisy that he’s more than just a good time bad boy.
Off the Edge by Carolyn Crane $ 0.99
From the Jacket Copy:
Charming and deadly secret agent Peter Macmillan is a man who uses language to hunt criminals. But when he seduces a beautiful singer in a Bangkok hotel to get clues for his latest mission, he learns he’s not the only one with dangerous enemies. To survive, they must trust each other with their lives—and their hearts.
Bridge of Spies by Giles Whittell $ 1.99
From the Jacket Copy:
Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first and most legendary prisoner exchange between East and West? Bridge of Spies vividly traces their paths to that exchange on February 10, 1962, when their fate helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the Cold War.
Bridge of Spies is the true story of three extraordinary characters – William Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, a British born KGB agent arrested by the FBI in New York City and jailed as a Soviet superspy for trying to steal America’s most precious nuclear secrets; Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot who was captured when his plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission over the closed cities of central Russia; and Frederic Pryor, a young American graduate student in Berlin mistakenly identified as a spy, arrested and held without charge by the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police.
By weaving the three strands of this story together for the first time, Giles Whittell masterfully portrays the intense political tensions and nuclear brinkmanship that brought the United States and Soviet Union so close to a hot war in the early 1960s. He reveals the dramatic lives of men drawn into the nadir of the Cold War by duty and curiosity, and the tragicomedy of errors that eventually induced Khrushchev to send missiles to Castro. Two of his subjects — the spy and the pilot — were the original seekers of weapons of mass destruction. The third, an intellectual, fluent in German, unencumbered by dependents, and researching a Ph.D. thesis on the foreign trade system of the Soviet bloc, seemed to the Stasi precisely the sort of person the CIA should have been recruiting. He was not. In over his head in the world capital of spying, he was wrongly charged with espionage and thus came to the Agency’s notice by a more roundabout route. The three men were rescued against daunting odds by fate and by their families, and then all but forgotten. Yet they laid bare the pathological mistrust that fueled the arms race for the next 30 years.
Drawing on new interviews conducted in the United States, Europe and Russia with key players in the exchange and the events leading to it, among them Frederic Pryor himself and the man who shot down Gary Powers, Bridge of Spies captures a time when the fate of the world really did depend on coded messages on microdots and brave young men in pressure suits. The exchange that frigid day at two of the most sensitive points along the Iron Curtain represented the first step back from where the superpowers had stood since the building of the Berlin Wall the previous summer – on the brink of World War III.
Let it Snow by Heidi Cullinan $ .99
From the Jacket Copy:
The weather outside is frightful, but the cabin is getting pretty hot.
Minnesota Christmas, Book 1
Stylist Frankie Blackburn never meant to go to Logan, Minnesota, but his malfunctioning GPS decided otherwise, and a record-breaking snowfall ensures he won’t be heading back to Minneapolis anytime soon. Being rescued by three sexy lumberjacks is fine as a fantasy, but in reality the biggest of the bears is awfully cranky and seems ready to gobble Frankie right up.
Marcus Gardner wasn’t always a lumberjack. Once a high-powered Minneapolis lawyer, he’s burned out and back home in Logan to lick his wounds, not play with a sassy city twink who might as well have stepped directly out of his past.
As the north winds blow and guards come down, Frankie and Marcus find they have a lot more in common than they don’t. Making a relationship last beyond a snowstorm could prove impossible when one man won’t live in the country and the other won’t return to the city. Yet the longer it snows, the deeper they fall in love, and all they want for Christmas is each other.
Warning: Contains power outages, excessive snowfall, and incredibly sexy bears.
Yes, I absolutely love Good Time Bad Boy. And Janine read it and liked it too. It’s a steal at $0.99. I think the special price is timed to coincide with Clark’s release of a self-published print version.
Good Time Bad Boy is an absolute gem. It was well worth the purchase price even at four times this much.
I loved Good Time Bad Boy. A big thanks to Sunita’s for her great review, it’s one of my top reads for this year.
@Sunita, et al.: Resistance is futile, I can see. *click*
Loved Off the Edge!! Great deal!!
The Forever War is 1.99 daily deal at amazon.. Famous scifi military novel which won a Hugo and Nebula award. Haven’t read it but snapped it up.
I really enjoyed the Cullinan – much lighter than her usual adult romances – no bdsm, no angst. The third novella in the series is coming out next month.
Another endorsement for Off the Edge: the LANGUAGE! Hot and funny. Totally believable that the characters are a linguist and a singer-songwriter.