Whiskey Beach by Nora Roberts, one of her most recent romantic suspense novels, is $5.00 for Kindle right now. The paperback of this book just came out, but the digital copy elsewhere is priced at $9.99. I'm signaling the price matching fairies with my giant discount alert beacon, but no response as of yet. Whiskey Beach is a contemporary romantic suspense about a man suspected of murdering his almost-ex-wife, and the yoga instructor/massage therapist he meets in a small coastal town. This book has a 3.8-star average on GR; readers really liked the strength of the characters and the setting. If you're looking for a gift for a Roberts fan in your life, this would be a very nice present for the upcoming weekend!
For more than three hundred years, Bluff House has sat above Whiskey Beach, guarding its shore – and its secrets.
To summer tourists, it's the crown jewel of the town's stunning scenery. To the residents of Whiskey Beach, it's landmark and legend. To Eli Landon, it's home…
A Boston lawyer, Eli has weathered an intense year of public scrutiny and police investigation after being accused of murdering his soon-to-be ex-wife. And though there was never enough evidence to have him arrested, his reputation is in tatters as well as his soul. He need sanctuary. He needs Bluff House.
While Eli's beloved grandmother is in Boston, recuperating from a nasty fall, Abra Walsh has card for Bluff House, among her other jobs as yoga instructor, jewelry maker, and massage therapist. She is a woman with an open heart and a wide embrace, and no one is safe from her special, some would say over-bearing, brand of nurturing – including Eli.
He begins to count on Abra for far more than her cooking, cleaning, and massage skills, and starts to feel less like a victim – and more like the kind of man who can finally solve the murder of his wife and clear his name. But Bluff House's many mysteries are a siren song to someone intent on destroying Eli and reaping the rewards. He and Abra will become entangled in a centuries-old net of rumors and half-truths that could pull them under the thunderous waters of Whiskey Beach…
Passion and obsession, humor and heart flow together in a novel about two people opening themselves up to the truth – and to each other.
Attachments by Rainbow Rowell is today's Audible Daily Deal at $3.95. This is an unabridged contemporary comedy romance about two women who work at a newspaper who email each other about everything, and the dude whose job it is to monitor company email. The reviews say it takes a long time for the protagonists to get together but the journey to get them to the happy ever after is hilarious and a unique story told through email messages and attachments.
“Hi, I'm the guy who reads your e-mail, and also, I love you . . . “
Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder know that somebody is monitoring their work e-mail. (Everybody in the newsroom knows. It's company policy.)
But they can't quite bring themselves to take it seriously. They go on sending each other endless and endlessly hilarious e-mails, discussing every aspect of their personal lives.
Meanwhile, Lincoln O'Neill can't believe this is his job now- reading other people's e-mail. When he applied to be “internet security officer,” he pictured himself building firewalls and crushing hackers- not writing up a report every time a sports reporter forwards a dirty joke.
When Lincoln comes across Beth's and Jennifer's messages, he knows he should turn them in. But he can't help being entertained-and captivated-by their stories. By the time Lincoln realizes he's falling for Beth, it's way too late to introduce himself.
What would he say . . . ?
The Dragon Business by Kevin Anderson is $1.99 for a few days at Amazon – and I'm pretty sure this is going to remain Amazon-only since it's from Amazon's science fiction/fantasy imprint. This isn't a romance but I'm including it because when I read the description, I knew a few of you might really like this book.
This is a fantasy-comedy about a young boy who believes his father is a former dragon slayer, and the stories his father shares to tell him the truth. It's a very wry, tongue-in-cheek story with a fair amount of irony and satire according to the reviews, and it has a 3.8-star average on GR.
King Cullin may be known as “the Dragon Slayer,” but he fears his son’s legacy will be as “King Maurice Who Speaks with Proper Grammar.” The boy keeps his nose buried in parchments, starry-eyed at the idea of noble knights and eager to hand royal gold to any con man hawking a unicorn horn. Tonight, though, Cullin will educate the prince in the truth behind minstrels’ silly songs of glory…
Long ago, in a kingdom, well, not that far from here really, young Cullin traveled the countryside as squire to brave Sir Dalbry, along with Dalbry’s trusted sidekick Reeger, selling dragon-protection services to every kingdom with a coffer. There were no dragons, of course, but with a collection of severed alligator heads and a willingness to play dirty, the trio of con men was crushing the competition. Then along came Princess Affonyl.
Tomboyish and with a head for alchemy, Affonyl faked a dragon of her own, escaped her arranged marriage, and threw in with Cullin and company. But with her father sending a crew of do-gooder knights to find her, the dragon business just got cutthroat
Staged to Death by Karen Rose Smith is $1.99 right now. This is a cozy mystery and the first in a series about a professional real estate home stager named Caprice de Luca. The book has a 3.9-star average on GR, and I can think of a few people who would love this as a gift for weekend reading (especially since it's a holiday weekend in the US, but for much of my area, the weather is supposed to be very drippy – reading time!!).
Cozy mystery, Book 1 in the Caprice DeLuca home-stager mystery series
Caprice DeLuca stages houses for high-end clients. When she discovers a body in the castle-mansion she staged to sell and starts asking questions, she finds herself in danger. On the way to solving the murder, Caprice's large Italian family helps and hinders. She also finds romance with Dr. Seth Randolph. But does her brother's partner, attorney Grant Weatherford, care about her, too? Or is he just worried she'll get herself killed and her family will blame him?
Oh Sarah, anyway to find out if Amazon Canada (Kindle) is going to match this lower price on Nora’s Whiskey Beach? I haven’t read it yet, and have been waiting/hoping for it to come down in price. Thanks so much.
I LIKED Attachments, but I didn’t compulsively LOVE it the way I did Fangirl. I felt the ending was a bit too neat and perfect to the point where it felt completely unrealistic and sort of undermined some of the character growth. Part of what I like about how books is how very realistic the characters and emotions are, and while you want a happily ever after, this one was just too much “wrapped up with a bow, the shiniest wrapping paper, and a free gift card to that restaurant you like”. I can’t really talk about it more without spoiling the plot, but while I liked the characters and their arcs, I wish the ending had been less twee.
Okay, I feel very, very ignorant right now, so please can someone tell this Brit just what the hell a ‘home stager’ is? Is it like an interior designer who decorates places so they’ll sell? I’m fairly sure we don’t have anything like this in the UK, although I stand to be corrected – I live in a horrible old barn of a place in Yorkshire, where we don’t have any truck with ‘staging’ of any kind. In fact, running a vacuum cleaner around just before a viewing is about as far as we go to sell a house.
I bought the funny dragon book – to the shock of no one, ever.
@Jane: Yep, that’s exactly what it is!
A home stager is someone who gets called in to decorate a house or place on the market, so it’s not so empty when a realtor shows it.
I hated Attachments. It was a whole novel built around Y2K and email monitoring. Maybe it would have worked 15 years ago. So dated.
All of the Anne of Green Gables books are on sale for kindle for 99 cents TOTAL.
I hate the fact that the Nora Roberts deals are almost NEVER available in Canada. Really annoying.
In Canada, a “home stager” is someone who comes and helps you clear everything personal out of your house until it is practically empty, and then provides “props” to make it look like a show house so potential buyers see it to its best advantage (apparently). In my experience, I paid a fortune for a home stager who was a complete idiot and put weird objets d’art (so called) in strange places.
Anyway, the theory is that potential home buyers are more likely to buy the house and to pay more for it if it looks mostly like a “blank slate” (though not totally empty), so they don’t have to imagine it without all your personal stuff in it.
I agree with Dora. I practically get out the squee canon every time I read Fangirl, but I thought Attachments was just OK.
@CarrieS You come sit by me *mmmhmmm* I too, bought the funny dragon book without a second thought to how close to divorce I come every month when the Amazon bill arrives. How could I not with Princess A “throwing in with the con men” and what not? Plus, DRAGONS!!! Or at least the idea of them 😉
@Jane, there was even a show built around the concept of staging a home for sale. It was called “Sell This House” and people who couldn’t sell their house would have the home stager come in and clear out and redo a few of the rooms to help make the house more sellable. When the housing market tanked, they had to redo the show and make it “Sell This House-Extreme” and actually remodel the house, because new paint and a few objets d’art wasn’t cutting it anymore. 😀
Thanks to everyone for their great replies to my question! I am now enlightened. I don’t think there’s anything similar in Britain (apart from maybe the ‘top end’ houses in London and the Home Counties, where people could afford to move out before the house was sold in order to give that ‘blank slate’). Over here people can’t afford to rent or move out before they sell, whilst still paying the mortgage on the house for sale, so we show people round amidst our detritus and they just have to imagine what the place will look like empty! But it does sound like a great thing…I can feel a book coming on…
Thanks again everyone.
@Jane: And one more point about home staging—the idea is that you invest up front in the home stager, and then, ideally, you end up better off because of the higher price that you get for the house when it sells. In theory, it should pay for the home stager and leave some left over by way of profit. So it isn’t something that is only done by people who are very well-off, though probably is most common where the seller is at least moderately well-off.
I can’t say whether that worked in my case. We sold our staged house for more than we asked, but most houses were selling over their asking price at the time. I would think it creates its own benefits—the market begins to expect that all houses will be staged, so ones that are not may be viewed as inferior. We were certainly told by our real estate agent that we would be foolish not to do it.
And there, you have now heard more about staging than you probably ever wanted to know!
Home staging definitely sort of existed in the UK. Back when I had Sky (so 5+ years ago there was a tv show called House Doctor about it.
I signed up to read the Nora Roberts book for the RITA challenge and at this point, I’m not digging it at all. I’m only about 15% in, but I’m seriously thinking about giving up on it. That’s so disappointing because I usually love Nora’s books.