Ravenhill (Jackie Shaw, #1)


John Steele - 2017
    He treads a fine line keeping psychotic hard-man Rab Simpson in check while sleeping with gang leader Billy Tyrie’s beautiful wife on the side. When a bomb claims nine lives, he is given the role of the getaway driver in a planned reprisal killing, a key role in a major operation. But Jackie may not be who he seems... Twenty years later, Jackie returns to the city for his father’s funeral after disappearing in mysterious circumstances. He wants to mourn then leave, but when figures from his past emerge, he is left with no choice but to revisit his violent former life. The first in the Jackie Shaw series, RAVENHILL is a gripping début novel from a brilliant new voice in crime fiction. The second in the series, SEVEN SKINS, is coming soon. ‘Tense, unsparing, compassionate and exceptionally well-written, this brilliant thriller brings vividly to life East Belfast in war and peace, its self-appointed community defenders turned brutal predators, and the security forces who struggled to contain them.’ Ruth Dudley Edwards

Free Kindle Books


Creep Creepersin - 2013
    This is the story of one man's quest to get the entire Amazon Kindle library for free and the repercussions of what an insane obsession could bring.

Gum Moon: A Novel of San Francisco Chinatown


Jeffrey L Staley - 2018
    A sympathetic prostitute befriends Chun, but two years later, at the height of a plague quarantine, Chun is thrust into a bewildering new world. A young Methodist woman rescues her and places her in a Home for abused and trafficked girls. The Home is destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, but Chun (aka "Maud") survives. In an attempt to raise funds to rebuild the Home, Maud and a group of seven other Chinese children embark on a six-month cross-country singing tour. Performing for President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House is the highlight of the journey, but when the matron of the Home suffers a breakdown, thirteen year-old Maud must find within herself the strength and resolve to lead the band of children home. The novel is based on events in the life of the author's wife's grandmother.

Before We Were Yours


Lisa Wingate - 2017
    Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty.Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption.Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.

These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901


Nancy E. Turner - 1998
    Scrupulously recording her steps down the path Providence has set her upon—from child to determined young adult to loving mother—she shares the turbulent events, both joyous and tragic, that molded her, and recalls the enduring love with cavalry officer Captain Jack Elliot that gave her strength and purpose.Rich in authentic everyday details and alive with truly unforgettable characters, These Is My Words brilliantly brings a vanished world to breathtaking life again.

An American Dream


Norman Mailer - 1965
    As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who murders his wife in a fashionable New York City high-rise, runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. One part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go.

Madam, Will You Talk?


Mary Stewart - 1955
    But when Charity arrived at their hotel in the picturesque French town of Avignon, she had no way of knowing that she was to become the principal player in the last act of a strange and brutal tragedy. Most of it had already been played. There had been love--and lust--and revenge and fear and murder.Very soon her dreams turn into a nightmare, when by befriending a terrified boy and catching the attention of his enigmatic, possibly murderous father, Charity has inadvertently placed herself center stage. She becomes enmeshed in the schemes of a gang of murderers. And now the killer, with blood enough on his hands, is waiting in the wings.

Harriet


Elizabeth Jenkins - 1934
    Elizabeth Jenkins's artistry, however, transforms the bare facts of this case from the annals of Victorian England's Old Bailey into an absolutely spine-chilling exploration of the depths of human depravity.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist


Mohsin Hamid - 2007
    As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter…Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.

Ham on Rye


Charles Bukowski - 1982
    From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, "Ham on Rye" offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

Steel Toes: A Novel


Eddie Little - 2001
    Little writes about the world he used to inhabit, a place filled with drugs, crime and danger at every turn. His electrifying prose brings to life the rough, raw, and seedy life of Boston's underworld where corruption lies at the heart of every deception.Bobbie is a young criminal prodigy. Living in Boston he's approached by a mysterious Greek on behalf of an anonymous shipping tycoon, who wants to commission a theft. The Fogg museum is the target; a collection of ancient Greek coins the score. Everything goes fine with the burglary, but with easy street just around the corner Bobbie's life takes an unexpected twist and his big score evaporates. With his life on the line, Bobbie must learn who he can trust when trusting anyone can make you lose everything. Steel Toes is as close to reality as fiction can get. Little draws you in with his knife sharp writing, his authentic and unflinching characters and plot as tight and strong as the hold of addiction.

Killing Suki Flood


Robert Leininger - 1991
    The moment Frank Limosin sees gorgeous eighteen-year-old Suki Flood sitting on the rear deck of the red Trans Am in the hot empty desert, he feels trouble in the air. The Trans Am has a flat tire. They're over ten miles from the nearest highway. And Suki, dressed in short shorts and a tiny halter top, doesn't know how to change a tire. Against Suki's will, Frank gives her a lesson in tire changing, then he thinks that's it, he'll never see her again. How wrong can one man be? Because Suki turns out to be fifty times more trouble than Frank ever dreamed possible. He saved her once. Now he has to save her again and again and again . . .

The Big Sky


A.B. Guthrie Jr. - 1947
    B. Guthrie Jr.'s epic adventure novels set in the American West. Here he introduces Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers: traveling the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Rockies, these frontiersmen live as trappers, traders, guides, and explorers. The story centers on Caudill, a young Kentuckian driven by a raging hunger for life and a longing for the blue sky and brown earth of big, wild places. Caught up in the freedom and savagery of the wilderness, Caudill becomes an untamed mountain man, whom only the beautiful daughter of a Blackfoot chief dares to love.

White Banners


Lloyd C. Douglas - 1936
    Douglas, was an American minister and author. He was born in Columbia City, Indiana, spent part of his boyhood in Monroeville, Indiana, Wilmot, Indiana and Florence, Kentucky, where his father, Alexander Jackson Douglas, was pastor of the Hopeful Lutheran Church. Douglas was one of the most popular American authors of his time, although he did not write his first novel until he was 50.

Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome


Robert Harris - 2006
    The stranger is a Sicilian, a victim of the island's corrupt Roman governor, Verres. The senator is Marcus Cicero—an ambitious young lawyer and spellbinding orator, who at the age of twenty-seven is determined to attain imperium—supreme power in the state. Of all the great figures of the Roman world, none was more fascinating or charismatic than Cicero. And Tiro—the inventor of shorthand and author of numerous books, including a celebrated biography of his master (which was lost in the Dark Ages)—was always by his side. Compellingly written in Tiro's voice, Imperium is the re-creation of his vanished masterpiece, recounting in vivid detail the story of Cicero's quest for glory, competing with some of the most powerful and intimidating figures of his—or any other—age: Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, and the many other powerful Romans who changed history. Robert Harris, the world's master of innovative historical fiction, lures us into a violent, treacherous world of Roman politics at once exotically different from and yet startlingly similar to our own—a world of Senate intrigue and electoral corruption, special prosecutors and political adventurism—to describe how one clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable man fought to reach the top.