Tranquil Reader

Book Cover Year Published: 2017 Genre: Crime; Mystery; Suspense Blurb: The Last Straw ,  by Ed Duncan, is a suspenseful crime thriller. This is the second book in the Pigeon Blood Red series.  When a teenage girl witnesses a carjacking gone bad, she is marked for death by a crime boss with no apparent motive. A black lawyer and a white enforcer with an unlikely history forge an uneasy alliance to protect the girl from a hit man with an agenda of his own. After they find out that the crime boss is the father of the black teenage carjacker, Paul Elliott - lawyer and close friend of the witness’s family - begins counseling them. As the long-simmering feud between Rico and John D'Angelo reaches boiling point, bodies start to pile up in rapid succession... and old scores will be settled. About the Author: Ed Duncan is a graduate of Oberlin College and Northwestern University Law School. He was a partner at a national law firm in Cleveland, Ohio for ma...

Book Cover Genre: Crime; Thriller Year Published: 2016 Blurb: Pigeon-Blood Red is a fast-paced and suspenseful crime thriller by Ed Duncan.  For underworld enforcer Richard "Rico" Sanders, it seemed like an ordinary job. Retrieve his gangster boss's priceless pigeon-blood red ruby necklace and teach the double-dealing cheat who stole it a lesson. A job like a hundred before it. But the chase quickly goes sideways and takes Rico from the mean streets of Chicago to sunny Honolulu, where the hardened hit man finds himself in uncharted territory when a couple of innocent bystanders are accidentally embroiled in the crime. As Rico pursues his new targets, the hunter and his prey develop an unlikely respect for one another and Rico is faced with a momentous decision: follow his orders to kill the couple whose courage and character have won his admiration, or refuse and endanger the life of the woman he loves? About the Author: Ed Duncan is a graduate of Oberli...

Year Published: 2017 Genre: Suspense; Crime Blurb: The writing team of Anne Rothman-Hicks and Kenneth Hicks released their latest crime thriller, Mind Me, Milady, in March 2017. Published by Melange Books, Mind Me, Milady is the third book in the Jane Larson series. The series also includes Praise Her, Praise Diana and Weave a Murderous Web.  All three novels are set in New York City where Anne and Ken have lived for the past forty-three years. In Mind Me, Milady, a serial killer is on the loose in New York. Police have dubbed him the Gentleman Rapist because of the mockingly polite way he speaks with his victims before he rapes them. Jane Larson is an attorney on the Upper East Side of New York City, and the Gentleman Rapist has chosen her to receive his calls announcing each conquest. He also reminds her in chilling terms that he will one day twist his wire around her throat and bend her to his will.Jane has professional and personal problems of her own, but she is f...

Book Cover Year Published: 2016 Genre: Crime; Thriller; Suspense Blurb: No good deed goes unpunished. When Jane Larson—a hot-shot litigator for a large firm in New York City—helps out a friend, she is sucked into the unfamiliar world of divorce and child support.  Jane's discovery of the deadbeat dads hidden assets soon unravels a web of lies, drugs, and murder that keeps getting more dangerous.  Soon, Jane is involved in a high stakes race to recover a missing suitcase of cash and catch the murderer before she becomes the next victim. About the Author(s): Anne Rothman-Hicks and Kenneth Hicks have been collaborating on books for forty-six years.  Their first joint effort was a student project while Anne was at Bryn Mawr College and Ken attended Haverford. Since then, they have written over twenty books together. They are members of International Thriller Writers. They live and work in New York City, where many of their books are set.  Their ...

My Copy of the Book Year Published: 2017 Genre: Chick Lit; Women's Fiction; Mystery Blurb: Everyone Has a Hidden Talent For Lucky O’Toole it’s murder…solving it. Surviving in Sin City takes cunning, a pair of five-inch heel, and a wiseass attitude. Lucky has mastered them all and has a pair of legs she uses to kick butt and turn heads. As the Chief Problem Solver for the Babylon, Las Vegas’s most over-the-top destination, mischief is in her job description. She’s good at her job. She’s less good at life. But who has time for a life when there’s a killer on the loose? And who would want to kill a clown? Lucky isn’t in any mood to find out. For one, it’s New Year’s Day and Lucky’s birthday. And she hasn’t caught her breath after a chase to the death in Hong Kong and Macau. Her French chef is pushing to set the wedding date…and introduce her to his mother. Her former lover, Teddie, wounded in the China chase, needs TLC. As if this wasn’t enough. A young woman, in town w...

My Copy of the Book Year Published: 2016 Genre: Suspense; Thriller Blurb: There’s a lot Jean hasn’t said over the years about the crime her husband was suspected of committing. She was too busy being the perfect wife, standing by her man while living with the accusing glares and the anonymous harassment.  Now her husband is dead, and there’s no reason to stay quiet. There are people who want to hear her story. They want to know what it was like living with that man. She can tell them that there were secrets. There always are in a marriage.  The truth—that’s all anyone wants. But the one lesson Jean has learned in the last few years is that she can make people believe anything… About the Author: My career has taken some surprising twists and turns over the years. I have been a journalist - senior writer at the Daily Mail, news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and chief reporter at The Mail on Sunday, where I won Reporter of the Year at the National Pre...

My Copy of the Book Year Published: 2017 Genre: Crime; Suspense Blurb: Oil—the currency of global economic power. Alter the supply a country controls; alter the power they wield.  Patrick Donovan, Texas wildcatter, sitting on a deep-water well, has tapped into a reservoir so vast it could totally alter the balance of economic power.  A software scatter-bomb planted in the trading software at the New York Mercantile Exchange. A software security engineer is killed. And the price of oil is dropping like a stone. Donovan goes missing, and an influential senior Senator from Texas is presumed dead. Sam Donovan, Patrick’s daughter, finds herself in the bullseye of a world scramble to gain control of her father’s well. A helicopter pilot operating between the rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, Sam knows how the game is played.  But this time, the stakes are life and death. As a hurricane bears down on the Gulf of Mexico, a man with everything to lose...

Blurb: A remote summer camp becomes a lurid crime scene when the bodies of two teenagers are found in a bloody, real-life rendering of a classic Grimm’s fairy tale. Trapped in the wilderness, the remaining counsellors must follow a trail of dark children’s fables in order to outwit a psychopath and save the dwindling survivors before falling prey to their own gruesome endings. Drawing on the grisly, uncensored details of history’s most famous fairy tales, Grimm Woods is a heart-pounding thriller about a deranged killer who uses traditional children’s stories as tropes in elaborate murders. Set against the backdrop of modern-day Michigan, it’s a journey through the mind of a dangerous zealot and a shocking glimpse into the bedtime stories you thought you knew. About the Author: D. Melhoff was born in a prairie ghost town that few people have heard of and even fewer have visited. While most of his stories are for adults, he also enjoys terrifying younger audiences from time to...

Book Cover Year Published: 2016 Genre: Thriller, Post-Apocalyptic Blurb: Aftermath is a growing series about war, love, brutality and most of all, survival. What was once the United States has become a savage post-apocalyptic environment where the worst of the worst prosper and the remaining good hide. The series features a brutal setting, where seven characters in different parts of the United States must adapt to this new environment. The "fight or flight" mentality plays into the story, as the nation is divided into factions fighting for control of the country. The government is outnumbered, outgunned, and forced into hiding as well to recoup their forces. The novel follows a fast paced momentum from the first page to the last word. The plot pits these characters against the elements and each other, with plot-lines intertwining on opposite sides of the war effort. And one character's quest for revenge can jeopardize not only the war outcome, but the resh...

My Copy of the Book Year Published: 2016 Genre: Thriller; Suspense; Crime Blurb: Kate Sawyer, a former NYPD undercover cop, injured badly in a takedown gone terribly wrong, is living in Portland, Oregon safe in the Witness Protection Program, while she undergoes experimental stem-cell treatment for a genetic case of early-onset Alzheimer's. Everyone thinks Kate can provide vital evidence that will lead to the recovery of twenty million dollars of diamonds that disappeared during the takedown. If she could only remember. One night, Kate returns to her condo to find a dead man in her bathtub with a note stuck in his pocket. I know what you've done. Her cover blown, Kate runs, knowing the clock is ticking. Chased by shadowy figures she can't remember, Kate must solve the mystery before it's too late. People close to her are being killed. Shadowy memories tease her. Some she recognizes as her own. Others don't seem familiar at all. Running fr...

Book Cover Year Published: 2015 Genre: Suspense/Thriller Blurb: The Golden Tup - a dreadful tale of paradise being cruelly taken by latent evil. Can evil be in a place? The tale opens with Verity, a farmer's wife, recalling how a young couple were arrested a few years previously for killing their new born baby. How could such a nice young couple have done such a dreadful thing? Through a series of flashbacks we learn how they had created their rural idyll, how an enigmatic man had come into their lives and how their idyll and relationship had gradually fallen apart - how, with references to Milton's Paradise Lost, their paradise was lost. Gradually the young wife reveals a dreadful past, but Verity realises that she is holding something back, but what? What is the terrible truth that caused her and her husband to kill their baby? In real life the good guys don't always win. About the Author: Leslie Garland was born in 1949, qualified as a Chartere...

My Copy of the Book Year Published: 2016 Genre: Suspense/Thriller Blurb: World-renowned scientist, Professor K knows he’s close to a ground-breaking discovery. He also knows he’s dying. With his last breath he anoints Dr Alexandra Delacroix as his successor and pleads with her to carry on his work. Delacroix unwittingly enters a dangerous world of unbridled ambition and greed that threatens to destroy her. Desperate and alone, she turns to celebrated author and journalist, Jack Rogan. Alistair Macbeth, self-made billionaire and enigmatic founder of Blackburn Pharmaceuticals, has a murky past. He knows he must secure Professor K’s discovery for his empire, or perish. Powerful and ruthless, he will stop at nothing to achieve his dark and deep desires. Meanwhile, when the parents of a famous rock star, Isis, are brutally murdered, Jack Rogan is asked to investigate. On a perilous journey of discovery that takes them around the globe, Jack and Lola Rodriguez—Isis’ r...