Hamfist Over Hanoi


G.E. Nolly - 2012
    He is based at Yokota Air Base, in Japan, and becomes comfortable flying generals and other VIPs around Asia in his Sabreliner executive jet. He is adjusting to his new marriage, and aside from the stress of TDY assignments, life is placid.But the war returns with a vengeance when Hamfist suffers a personal loss at the hands of the North Vietnamese. Hamfist knows that the only way he can find inner peace is to go back for another combat tour, to try to bring the horrific war to a speedy end. And this time, he will fly a fighter, the top-of-the-line F-4 Phantom II.Hamfist checks out in the F-4 and arrives at his base in Thailand just in time for the start of Operation Linebacker, the bombing offensive over Hanoi. He soon finds himself flying over the most heavily defended area in the world, dodging Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs) and dueling with enemy aircraft, the vaunted MiG-series fighters. And along the way he has picked up two new goals: completing 100 missions over North Vietnam and defeating a MiG in aerial combat.Only time will tell if Hamfist will achieve his 100 missions, score a victory over a MiG and, most important, help end the war.

Red Runs the Plain


W.R. Benton - 2007
    Army Scout'Escaping from the Oto Indians who brutally slaughtered his whole family, fifteen-year-old Jarel Wade runs aimlessly into a snowstorm. On the verge of death he's rescued by a pair of cantankerous old mountain men as rugged as the mountains off which they live. Taken under their wing, Jarel proves himself worthy of the trail, but something's coming; something far more sinister that will test every ounce of his newly earned skills and mettle. A rogue former British Army officer is systematically exterminating the free trappers. He wants to corner the fur trade for himself, and he commands a pack of thieves, murderers and outcasts who know the mountains as well as they know how to dig Jarel a grave."RED RUNS THE PLAIN is a crackerjack story written by a craftsman at the top of his form. A whirlwind of a tale that will keep you turning pages."— Matt Braun

The Lost Princess ( Sravanapura Royals #3)


Preethi Venugopala - 2019
    Yet, the man she has loved all her life will not warm up to her.Rajeev, a hotshot movie director, has feelings for Ishaani. But, she is his sister's best friend and has been like another sibling to him. Yet, what can he do if he feels compelled to make her his own?Then, Ishaani's life changes overnight. She is no longer a lowly commoner but a princess.She has to make some tough decisions to protect the man she loves.Her choices lead them both down a path filled with shocking revelations and devastating consequences.Will true love prevail?Or will the many twists of fate tear them apart?

Never Came Home: A Riveting Kidnapping Mystery


Hazel Holmes - 2021
    

Maple Syrup Mysteries Boxed Set, #1-3


Emily James - 2017
    She couldn’t have been more wrong… A STICKY INHERITANCE – BOOK 1 Sometimes the truth can be a sticky thing… Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes feels like the only failure amid a family of high achievers. Her boyfriend turned out to be married, and her career as a defense attorney is in tatters. When she inherits her uncle’s maple syrup farm, she thinks it’s time for a change—one that keeps her far away from bad guys. For half a day at least. Her uncle’s suicide wasn’t a suicide at all. And as Nicole closes in on his killer, she not only risks becoming the murderer’s next victim, but also starts to wonder if knowing the truth is ever worse than believing the lie… BUSHWHACKED – BOOK 2 Sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets… What former lawyer Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes wants is to peacefully run her maple syrup farm. What she gets is a body run over by her car. It turns out to be the manager of the local animal shelter, and his death wasn't the accident it at first seems. With a little finagling, Nicole convinces the interim police chief to allow her to help with the case, even though she’s also busy trying to settle in to her new role as owner of Sugarwood and figure out her unusual friendship with the county medical examiner. As Nicole closes in on being able to put the killer behind bars, will she manage to find the evidence she needs before the murderer puts her in a cage—or a body bag—instead? ALMOST SLEIGHED – BOOK 3 The truth always comes with a price… Former lawyer Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes has finally settled in to her new home in Fair Haven, and her first maple syrup season is upon them. It’s not going as smoothly as she’d hoped. Their sap lines keep springing leaks, and as if that wasn’t enough, Nicole finds their groom-mechanic, Noah, apparently trampled in one of the horse stalls. Fair Haven’s interim police chief is ready to declare it an accident, but Nicole believes otherwise. With Noah in a coma, she’s determined to figure out who wanted to kill him before the perpetrator can return and finish the job. But whoever attempted to kill Noah has other ideas and is willing to do whatever it takes to stop Nicole from discovering the truth—even destroy Sugarwood and the man Nicole loves. These books are "clean" reads and contain no swearing, gore, or steamy bedroom scenes. While the series is best enjoyed in order, each book is a complete mystery on its own.

A Forest with No Trees


Peter Hey - 2015
    It’s a lie, of course. What I mean is, I remember so very little.’ Tom Haworth is struggling against the fragility of his own mind as it surrenders to what seems an increasingly hostile world. He begins to be haunted by vivid dreams that transport him into a different life and to a treeless forest, high in the stark moorland of industrial England around the time of the First World War. There he meets family he never knew existed and a girl called Clara, whom he recognises as the blueprint for every woman he has ever loved. Back in the present, he discovers he is losing days: vaguely remembered yesterdays in which he has acted out of character, as if someone were taking his place. Tom traces back through his family tree and discovers the characters in his dreams to be real and not just products of his unstable subconscious. Where are the ‘memories’ coming from? Has madness finally taken hold? And is Clara lost to him forever, or will she be his salvation? A story of redemption and rebirth that weaves compellingly between different times and different lives. Inspired by a gravestone in a remote Pennine cemetery, this story had been nagging at the author for over a decade. Eventually he gave in.

Holes: A Play


Louis Sachar - 2015
    This winner of the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award features Stanley Yelnats, a kid who is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnats. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys' detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the warden makes the boys "build character" by spending all day, every day, digging holes five feet wide and five feet deep. It doesn't take long for Stanley to realize there's more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake: the warden is looking for something. Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment-and redemption..

The Summer of 1974 (The Gavrielle Series Book 1)


Yael Politis - 2019
    They could hardly be more different, so why do they feel so connected? Gavrielle Rozmann (daughter of Ilana Rozmann from The Lonely Tree) is on leave from a career in the Israeli army. After suffering personal loss and the general trauma of the Yom Kippur War – and the horrific terror attacks that followed it, she is also dealing with a personal crisis. Born an orphan, she has received information that a man in Florida might be able to help her find the father she has never known. Should she get on a plane for Florida? Instead, she boards one for Rome – for a vacation and time to think. There she meets Charlie Freeman (from Whatever Happened to Mourning Free?).Charlie, a young black man, has just graduated from the University of Michigan and Charlene, the white woman who has given him a home, has big plans for him. She believes he could become a true leader, following in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.But her plans have little to do with the future he envisions for himself. What better place for a student of art and architecture to take time for reflection than the open air museum called Rome? These two strangers – who seem to have absolutely nothing in common – discover they share a basic reality that other people may find difficult to understand. The Summer of 1974 draws you into the lives of believable, well-developed characters. People you care about, even when you don’t approve of their actions. Though set in a specific historical/political context, this book is about personal relationships – love, friendship, and family.

Merry Wrath Mysteries Boxed Set Vol. I


Leslie Langtry - 2016
    Instead of black bag drops in Bangkok, she now spends her time leading a young Girl Scout troop. But Merry's new simple life turns not-so-simple when an enemy agent shows up dead at scout camp. Suddenly Merry is forced to deal with her former life in order to preserve her future one. It doesn't help matters that the CIA sends in her former, sexy handler to investigate…or that the hot new neighbor across the street turns out to be the local detective in charge of her case. And when Merry is forced to take on a roommate in the voluptuous form of a turned KGB agent/bimbo, things become trickier than wet work in Waukegan or cookie sales in the spring. Nothing in the CIA or Girl Scouts' training manuals has prepared her for what comes next… Mint Cookie Murder (book #2) Ex-CIA agent turned suburban scout leader, Merry Wrath, is just trying to live a normal, quiet life. But all that goes out the window when a convicted traitor (who’s inconveniently not in his prison cell) dies on her doorstep, and an obese cat, who bears a disturbing resemblance to Hitler, decides to move in. To make things worse, it’s time for the annual troop cookie sale, her new boyfriend’s old college flame shows up to win him back, and someone’s shooting at Merry in the frozen foods section of the grocery store. Is the assassin after her or the cat? Is Riley, her hot former CIA handler, hitting on her? Is Rex, her boyfriend, going to dump her? Will she sell enough cookies to take her troop to Winter Sniper Camp? If Merry doesn't find answer to these questions soon, it may be too late! Marshmallow S'More Murder (book #3) What could be better for former CIA agent turned Girl Scout leader Merry Wrath than taking twelve little girls to Washington DC for a bit of summer fun? Almost anything. Unfortunately, between her girls terrorizing the Secret Service and "accidentally" destroying the hotel pool, Merry has her hands full with this troop. And when her former handler, Riley, is kidnapped Merry has to turn to an old friend from her spy days and her parents, Senator and Mrs. Czrgy, to help her wrangle the troop and rescue the man she once briefly called her boyfriend. Armed only with a perpetually AWOL parent, stalked by a runaway King Vulture, and plagued by a mysterious death from her past, Merry's mayhem weaves a wacky trail from moonshiners in the Blue Ridge Mountains, to the bowels of the Japanese Embassy, to the ductwork of the International Spy Museum. With things heating up with current boyfriend, Detective Rex Ferguson, can Merry decipher clues from her past to find ex¬-boyfriend Riley and finally solve the murder of Yakuza boss, Midori Ito, before the target on her back is filled with lead?

The Face in the Locket


Alexandra Connor - 2003
    The two sisters have their own secrets, hiding difficult childhoods yet still maintaining an air of superiority and righteousness with those around them. Living with them is their brother, Saville, an adult but with the mind of a seven year old. The little girl’s arrival soon turns their world upside down. Great plans are laid for their good-looking, headstrong niece. Harris is going to marry well. Everything changes when World War Two breaks out. Harris falls in love with a man who only has his own interests at heart. She scandalises and disgraces her family with her obsessive behaviour, making herself a laughing stock in the close-knit town. But Harris is not to be put down. She begins to build a successful business with the support of her aunts and her close friend, Bonny. She eventually meets and agrees to marry the respectable local solicitor to the happiness of her aunts, but at the altar, she hears her lost love enter the church…. And once again, she shows her true colours. When tragedy strikes, Harris fights to regain respectability in the eyes of those who care for her but has Harris learned any lessons from her obsessive past…?

Red Dragon (Winds of War Book 3)


William Dietz - 2020
    Dietz, the New York Times bestselling author of the America Rising novels, comes RED DRAGON, the third book in the Winds of War series following RED FLOOD. World War III is a few months month old. After attacking, and sinking the Destroyer USS Stacy Heath, the Chinese seize control of Nepal and Bhutan and push into India where the Allies manage to stop them. But for how long? Pakistan is attacking from the north--and China is preparing for the "big push” from the east. Worse yet, China’s Ministry of State Security has orders to assassinate the Dalai Lama, rather than run the risk that he will inspire a Buddhist rebellion in Tibet. As a team of assassins close in on the Dalai Lama, Green Beret Captain Jon Lee and his men are behind Chinese lines in Nepal, battling to rescue a downed fighter pilot before enemy troops can capture him.   The entire subcontinent is at risk if the assassins succeed…  And, if the region falls, hundreds of thousands of people will die--even as millions more are lost to the Axis.  Together with a self-centered army doctor named Wendy Kwan, and a team consisting of both green berets and Gurkhas, it will be Lee's responsibility to navigate treacherous terrain--and prevent Chinese Agent Fan Tong and his special ops team from changing the course of the war.

Empire Day (New England Book 1)


James Philip - 2018
     It is the day before Empire Day – 4th July - the day each year when the British Empire marks the brutal crushing of the rebellion dignified by the treachery of the fifty-six delegates to the Continental Congress who were so foolhardy as to sign the infamous Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on that day of infamy in 1776. It is nearly two hundred years since George Washington was killed and his Continental Army was destroyed in the Battle of Long Island and now New England, that most quintessentially loyal and ‘English’ imperial fiefdom – at least in the original, or ‘First Thirteen’ colonies - is about to celebrate its devotion to the Crown and the Old Country, of which it still views, in the main, as the ‘mother country’. Yet all is not roses. Since 1776 in a world of empires the British Empire has grown and prospered until now, it stands alone as the ultimate arbiter of global war and peace. The Royal Navy has enforced the global Pax Britannia for over a century since the World War of the 1860s established a lasting but increasingly tenuous ‘peace’ between the great powers. Nonetheless, while elsewhere the Empire may be creaking at the seams, struggling to come to terms with a growing desire for self-determination; thus far the Pax Britannica has survived – buttressed by the commercial and industrial powerhouse of New England stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific North West - intact for all that barely a year goes by without the outbreak of another small, colonial war somewhere... This said, the British ‘Imperial System’ remains the envy of its friends and enemies alike and nowhere has it been so successful as in North America, where peace and prosperity has ruled in the vast Canadian dominions and the twenty-nine old and recent colonies of the Commonwealth of New England for the best part of two centuries. In Whitehall every British government in living memory has complacently based its ‘American Policy’ on the one immutable, unchanging fact of New England politics; that the First Thirteen colonies will never agree with each other about anything, let alone that the sixteen ‘Johnny-come-lately’ new (that is, post-1776) colonies, protectorates, territories and possessions which comprise half the population and eight-tenths of the land area of New England, should ever have any say in their affairs! New England is a part of England and always will be because, axiomatically, it will never unite in a continental union. Notwithstanding, in the British body politic the myths and legends of that first late eighteenth-century rebellion in the New World still touches a raw nerve in the old country, much as in former epochs memories of Jacobin revolts, Oliver Cromwell and the Civil War still harry old deep-seated scars in the national psyche. Empire Day might not have originally been conceived as a celebration of the saving of the first British Empire and but as time has gone by it has come to symbolise the one, ineluctable truth about the Empire: that New England is the rock upon which all else stands, an empire within an empire that is greater than the sum of all the other parts of the great imperium ruled from London. In past times a troubling question has been whispered in the corridors of power in London: what would happen to the Empire – and the Pax Britannica – if the British hold on New England was ever to be loosened? Generations of British politicians have always known that if the question was ever to be asked again in earnest it has but one answer.

Venom


Christian Cantrell - 2011
    Gabriel Kane goes from a struggling architect to one of the most powerful men in the world; Armonía Solorsano -- a young Hispanic girl who grew up in a dilapidated suburban McMansion-turned-tenement -- invents one of the most important and influential pieces of technology in history; a non-profit organization goes from a charity to a decentralized domestic terrorist group; and the greatest democracy in the world finds itself falling into the ever-tightening grip of a dictator.As five people come together with the shared goal of changing the world, they discover that their approaches are fundamentally and irreconcilably at odds. Their partnership becomes a bitter political and high-tech rivalry from which only one of them can emerge.This novella by Christian Cantrell (about 16,000 words) portrays an intersection of politics and technology which is both extremely relevant, and frighteningly feasible.

Dark Rosaleen


Michael Nicholson - 2015
    Historically accurate, it is a story of murder and betrayal, of a failed rebellion, and the love of a national scandal.  Charles Trevelyan was Secretary of the Treasury, and Director of the Famine Relief Programme at a time when famine raged and antipathy in English politics towards the plight of those affected raged equally. Kathryn, Charles' daughter, likewise felt no sympathy until the very scale of the tragedy became apparent. Joining the underground, she preached insurrection, stole food for the starving, and became the lover of the leader of the rebellion. She became known as Dark Rosaleen, the heroine of banned nationalist poem, was branded as both traitor and cause celebré. This is her story.

The Last Gunfighter Of Space


Ty Patterson - 2017
    IT FINDS A THIEF 5050 AD. Earth as we know it has been decimated. It is a radioactive wasteland. The few millions who survived, fled to Calara, a planet in the Icarus Galaxy, where they have established civilization. But, life on Calara hasn't turned out the way they wanted it. AI rule over them. Which wasn't the way humans saw how their lives turning out when they arrived on the new planet. They brought their ways and technology. They tried to colonize the other planets and stars in the galaxy. As humans have tended to do. Then, AI took over. But now, the humans are rebelling. Remember history? They need someone to rally around. To lead them. To show them the way. Enter Cade Stryker. Let's not glorify him. He is a thief. He sails Andy, short for Andromeda, his ship, in the farthest reaches of space. Trading with anyone, anywhere. Well, he calls it trade. Everyone else calls it smuggling. He thinks he is like Wyatt Earp. Because where he flies, is indeed like the Wild West. No rules. No borders. There's the small matter that Earp was a lawman. And Cade is a... let's not harp on that. So, Cade. He isn't in the hero business. No, sir. Cade is too smart for that. Because heroes have a short shelf life. And need to have noble intentions. Cade and noble don't go together. Nope. The fate of humans definitely Does Not lie in the hands of Cade Stryker. No way. Check out Ty Patterson's USA Today Bestselling Warriors Series The Warrior The Reluctant Warrior The Warrior Code The Warrior's Debt Boxset 1, Books 1-4 Flay Behind You Hunting You Zero Boxset 2, Books 5-8 Death Club Trigger Break Scorched Earth RUN!