http://ereads.com/ecms/book_title/Snow-Job

Fans of Canadian police chief Reid Bennett have waited a long, long time for all ten thrillers in Ted Wood’s series to be back under one roof. Oddly, we had #s 1 through 7 plus 9 and 10, but the eighth, Snowjob, had met with production delays.  But that’s all behind us: Snowjob is back in print and the series is now complete.  And if you’re worried about Bennett’s German Shepard sidekick Sam, don’t be – he’s back too.

The faithful companion is still by his side in a case that takes them across the border to Chambers, Vermont, where an old buddy needs Reid’s help.

Doug Ford, a black policeman in the all-white town, has been charged with murdering the attractive bookkeeper of a local ski resort. Only Reid believes Doug’s story that he and the woman were working together to investigate an entrenched money laundering conspiracy. But, as new bodies pile up and the Mafia rears its ugly head, things start to fall in line with Doug’s story. Can Reid untangle the mystery before more blood gets shed? He’ll have to act fast–an unseen hand seems willing to stop at nothing to keep its secrets safe.

Intense action, sinister prejudices, and duty to old friends make for another attention-grabbing thriller from Canada’s favorite crime author, Ted Wood.

Nine other Reid Bennetts await you. Visit Ted Woods’ author page to see them all.

There are eight novels in Barbara Parker’s gripping series of legal thrillers featuring Gail Connor and Anthony Quintana, who are frequently on opposite sides of the courtroom but seldom on opposite sides of the bed. For reasons too tiresome to relate E-Reads published volumes #1-6 and #8 but the seventh book, Suspicion of Madness, got left out.

Until today.

But now, Gail and Anthony are together at last and Parker’s “Suspicion” series is complete.

In Madness, a romantic trip to the Florida Keys turns deadly when a young former client of Quintana’s comes under investigation for murder. It seems like an open-and-shut case of innocence. But strange lies and more dead bodies lie hidden in the lush landscape of the Keys. As Gail and Anthony meet the island’s odd assortment of inhabitants, they find that everyone has a scheme of their own. Now, a tropical storm looms overhead, trapping them all in a tinderbox of explosive danger and deep passions.

Parker’s series really should be ready in the proper sequence to see Gail and Anthony’s relationship in all its ups and downs.  So click here to see them all.

E-Reads is proud to release James R. Benn’s  thriller Souvenir for the first time anywhere. Benn is author of the popular World War II mystery series featuring Billy Boyle.

In Souvenir, secrets trail an American soldier from his Depression upbringing to the cold winter battles in the Ardennes Forest in the last months of World War II, and through the post-war decades, as he struggles to keep his family from being torn apart while keeping the truth buried close to his heart.

Clay Brock, proprietor of Jake’s Tavern, has endured terrible losses throughout his life. In 1964, he is working to build a life for his wife and son, only to see everything he’s worked for threatened by forces beyond his control. To keep his family from breaking apart, he must confront the very secret he has kept buried. For Clay, the war has never been over, and his foxhole buddy Jake Burnett never far from his thoughts. At two crucial points in his life, as a young father and later as an old man at the dawn of a new and unfamiliar century, his memories draw him back until he must confront them and speak the truth. But at what cost?

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James R. Benn is the author of the popular Billy Boyle World War II mystery series. The debut title, Billy Boyle, was a Dilys Award nominee and one of Booksense’s Top Five mysteries for 2006. Subsequent titles have received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal and two have been tagged as “Killer Books” by the Independent Mystery Bookseller’s Association. He lives in Hadlyme, Connecticut with his wife, Deborah Mandel. For more information, visit his website at: www.jamesrbenn.com

James R. Benn’s thriller On Desperate Ground portrays larger-than-life men and women caught up in the death throes of Nazi Germany, struggling to maintain those things precious to them—life, an end to killing, and even sanity itself. Benn’s name will be familiar to fans of his Billy Boyle World War II mystery series,

Colonel Johann Faust has lost everyone he ever loved and feels he is going inexorably insane. He hears the haunting voice of his dead fiancée and the demons that roar through his mind as he perfects a plan to save Nazi Germany from defeat and insure a greater and deadlier new world war.

Captain Dieter Neukirk, once a protégé of Faust’s, is more concerned with saving the lives of his remaining men than in sacrificing them in a fanatical last stand. Meanwhile, Elsa Klein, Dieter’s lover and the chief social worker at a Berlin hospital, is engaged in her own dangerous work, providing medical care and identity papers to hidden Jews in the city.

American Captain Mack Mackenzie, pulled from a military hospital before his wounds are healed, is assigned to investigate reports of a secret Nazi operation. Wanting only to make it home alive, Mack finds himself in a life and death struggle with unlikely allies and a ferociously determined opponent.

Americans and Germans alike are drawn to a hilltop in the remote German countryside, where they find themselves between powerful armies and forced into a terrible decision that could end one war or begin a new one.

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James R. Benn is the author of the popular Billy Boyle World War II mystery series. The debut title, Billy Boyle, was a Dilys Award nominee and one of Booksense’s Top Five mysteries for 2006. Subsequent titles have received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal and two have been tagged as “Killer Books” by the Independent Mystery Bookseller’s Association. He lives in Hadlyme, Connecticut with his wife, Deborah Mandel. For more information, visit his website at: www.jamesrbenn.com

Life has imitated art in the terrifying release of dozens of lions, tigers and other wild animals into the Ohio countryside by the crazed owner of an exotic animal menagerie who then did away with himself, according to a story that broke this past week.

For a tense 24 hours several of the beasts including bengal tigers were on the loose, stalking the countryside. If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because you read the blurb for Jack Warner’s edge-of-your-chair thriller Maneater.  In Maneater a wild tiger has escaped its cargo truck and now roams the dense forests of the Appalachian Mountains. When deer and wild boar run out, the tiger turns its growing hunger towards man. Now it has a taste for easy prey. With a body-count on the rise and the media coming in, Sheriff Grady Brickhouse calls upon Jim Graham, a tiger hunter trained in India to end the man-eater’s killing spree.

However, Graham is retired, and at 73 his body isn’t as fast as it used to be. The only edge Graham holds now is a nine-year-old boy who has somehow bonded with the tiger. But, it’s a bond that makes him protective of the beast, even as it circles ever closer to hurting the ones he loves. This hunt will probably be Graham’s last. The question is, will it end with the tiger’s death or his own?

In Maneater, Jack Warner crafts a tightly suspenseful adventure novel, where death hides in the shadows of small town life. It will have you straining to hear the low growl of the wild before it’s too late…

Perhaps this book will have some resonance in view of the current world political climate…,

E-Reads has published very few original books, but we just couldn’t pass up Friend of My Enemy by Benjamin Eric Hill and we thought that the season of good will was the right time to feature a love story between a cold-blooded Israeli Mossad agent and a beautiful but proud Palestinian woman fighting to keep above pressure by terrorists. Though written a few years ago, nothing has really changed since then. Will love conquer the brutality of an age-old enmity? Read this white-knuckle thriller and find out.

- Richard Curtis

Originally published in 1980, Five Minutes to Midnight is a prophetic and terrifying vision of the threat of nuclear terrorism.

As Independence Day approaches, millions of Americans are planning a celebratory holiday while one radical, Carlos the Jackal, leader of the dreaded Terror International, planner of the Entebbe highjacking and the massacre at the Munich Olympics, has plans to raise the level of terror to new heights while bringing the threat home to the U.S. with a stolen nuclear weapon.

Standing in his way is Sam Sartain, a member of an elite counterintelligence team, who has long pursued Carlos and learned to analyze the twisted mind and plans of a mass killer. As he follows a series of deadly leads that range from the University campus in Berkeley, California to a prison in Berlin, races against time to prevent a colossal act of destruction in Washington, DC itself.

The author, Sabi Shabtai, an internationally recognized authority on terrorism, has served as consultant and lecturer to numerous corporations, airlines, police departments, SWAT teams, and the U.S. Army and Navy.  He served in the intelligence branch of the Israel Defense Forces and was a member of the Israeli Foreign Service. It will come as no surprise that he specializes in political violence and terrorism. In fact he has served as an undercover trouble-shooter on five continents.

Dr. Shabtai sold several scripts based on his personal exploits and expertise to the major studios. The hit movie Passenger 57 is loosely based on his own personal hijacking experience in the 1980′s, and The Assignment, starring Aidan Quinn, Donald Sutherland, and Ben Kingsley, is based on the author’s hunt for the master terrorist, Carlos The Jackal.

You say you’re a fan of detective novels but you haven’t discovered Richard Prather’s Shell Scott?  Hmmm, I don’t know about you…

But you can atone for your sin by picking up just about any of the nearly forty novels and story collections penned by the late great Prather and joining his humorous private eye on another whacked-out caper, inevitably populated by plug-ugly goons and scantily clad ladies in jeopardy. Shell is an endearing, self-satirizing hero who is as likely to nail the bad guys by bumbling as by brilliant detection and bravado.

I was one of millions who feasted on Shell Scotts like popcorn and now I’m happy to introduce them to you.  For light summer reading there just is nothing better.

The books aren’t in any particular sequence, so you can start anywhere, but what the heck, start with A, Always Leave ‘Em Dying, and work your way down to W, Way of a Wanton.

Richard Curtis

Gail Connor and Anthony Quintana are a combustible mix – but if they combust they could ruin their professional careers. Passionately attracted to each other, they are equally passionate defenders of their clients even when their interests are completely adversarial.

Set all this tension against the sultry background of a Miami riddled with crime and corruption, drowning in drugs, illegal immigrants and shady deals, and simmering with a melting-pot clash of cultures and you have a recipe for a hotly explosive series of legal thrillers by Barbara Parker. You can find them on Barbara’s author page.

In the debut novel, Suspicion of Innocence, Gail Connor is a fast-rising attorney in a major law firm, about to make partner—until her life is derailed by the discovery of her sister’s murdered body and the possibility that Gail is the prime suspect. Gail must fight for her life as she gets a first-hand look at the dark underside of the legal system she is pledged to uphold.

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Barbara Parker was a dear friend, a dedicated professional writer and a beloved and esteemed client whose untimely passing was and remains a source of anguish to all who knew her. Trained as a lawyer, she worked as a prosecutor with the state attorney’s office in Dade County, Florida before moving into a private practice specializing in real estate and family law. Suspicion of Innocence, published in 1994, was her first legal thriller. It was followed by seven more titles featuring her two lawyer protagonists and sometime lovers, Gail Connor and Anthony Quintana. Suspicion of Innocence was a finalist for a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, and two other Gail and Anthony novels, Suspicion of Deceit and Suspicion of Betrayal, were New York Times bestsellers. She died in March 2009, at age 62. Too young. Far, far too young.

RC

For Americans and their lawmakers the looming financial and government crisis is terra incognita.  But not for Dan Simmons, whose just-published Flashback projects a dystopian future launched by a collapse identical to the one that is unfolding in our nation today.

In the author’s words, “Flashback posits the possibility that the United States of America, if it continues accruing debt without rethinking its spending and social welfare programs, could implode in sudden and total bankruptcy, losing not only its position in the world but its own sense of self for hundreds of millions of its citizens. In Flashback, this canary also imagines a cheap and available drug called flashback; a drug that allows hundreds of millions of Americans to find an escape hatch from life in such a damned and dismal future simply by reliving the good parts of their former lives. Over and over. And over.”

Simmons’s dark view of the world around the corner from today is controversial and has raised some hackles among fans and critics who like their futures to be politically correct. They obviously have confused dystopian and utopian. Simmons hasn’t.

But, taken for what it also is, a futuristic thriller packed with beautifully limned characters and a mystery that can only be solved by drug-induced time-travel, it is another triumph by the author of The Terror, Hyperion, Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night.

In a starred review Publishers Weekly says “Simmons makes some logical if depressing extrapolations from current political and economic developments in this outstanding mystery thriller set in a near-future dystopic United States.” Booklist calls it “Another winner from Simmons, whose imagination seems to know no bounds.”

Simmons has addressed a long letter to his fans detailing the thinking processes behind a book that will be debated for a long time to come. You can read his message here.