Ebook Deals: Award-Winning Literary Mysteries

National Book Award Finalist

One August afternoon, two sisters — Sophia and Alyona — go missing from a beach on the far-flung Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia. Taking us through the year that follows, Disappearing Earth enters the lives of women and girls in this tightly knit community who are connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.

Lambda Literary Award Winner

At the heart of Union Atlantic lies a test of wills between a retired history teacher, Charlotte Graves — who has suddenly begun to hear her two dogs speaking to her in the voices of Cotton Mather and Malcolm X — and an ambitious young banker, Doug Fanning, who is building an ostentatious mansion on what was once Charlotte’s family land. Drawn into the conflict is Nate Fuller, a troubled high-school student who stirs powerful emotions in both of them. What emerges is a riveting story of financial power, the defense of tradition, and the distortions of desire these forces create.

Edgar Award Finalist

When a casino robbery in Atlantic City goes horribly awry, the man who orchestrated it is obliged to call in a favor from someone who’s occasionally called Jack. While it’s doubtful that anyone knows his actual name or anything at all about his true identity, or even if he’s still alive, he’s a criminal’s criminal who does entirely as he pleases and is almost impossible to get in touch with. From its riveting opening pages, Ghostman effortlessly pulls the reader into Jack’s refined and peculiar world — and the sophisticated shadowboxing grows ever more intense as he moves, hour by hour, toward a constantly reimprovised solution.

Crook’s Corner Book Prize Winner

When the BP oil spill devastates the Louisiana Gulf Coast, the citizens of the bayou town of Jeanette scramble to replace their lost livelihoods. Among them is Gus Lindquist, who has nothing left but the dying glimmer of a boyhood dream: finding the lost treasure of pirate Jean Lafitte. With his metal detector and Pez dispenser full of Oxycontin, Lindquist steers his rickety shrimp boat into the savage Louisiana swamps. Along his journey, Gus meets a motley crew of characters, petty criminals searching for a secret. Funny, dark, and compelling, The Marauders throws these characters on a rollicking collision course that all of them might not survive.

Pulitzer Prize Award Winner

Pak Jun Do becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his overlords to stay alive. He boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress. Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love.

Hugo Award Nominee

At Mercy General Hospital, Dr. Joanna Lander is a psychologist specializing in near-death experiences. A brilliant young neurologist, Dr. Richard Wright, arrives and has come up with a way to manufacture the near-death experience using a psychoactive drug. When his key volunteer suddenly drops out of the study, Joanna finds herself offering to become Richard’s next subject. Each time Joanna goes under, her sense of dread begins to grow, ending in a shattering scenario that will keep you feverishly reading until the final climactic page is turned.

New York Times Notable Book

Critics have compared him to Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Tom Wolfe, and Don DeLillo. In My Revolutions, Chris Carver is living a lie. His wife, their teenage daughter, and everyone in their circle know him as Michael Frame, suburban dad. They have no idea that as a radical student during the ’60s, he briefly became a terrorist, protesting the Vietnam War by setting off bombs. Until one day a ghost from his past turns up on his doorstep, forcing Chris on the run.

Edgar Award Nominee

On a blustery April day, the quiet, rather private wife of a doctor discovers that her husband has been having an affair. Moments later, driving along a winding country road, she fails to see 61-year-old Ruth Mitchell up ahead, riding her bicycle. She hits her, and drives away. The hit-and-run driver is never found. But the doctor’s wife, horrified by what she has done, begins to unravel. Soon she turns her attention to Ruth’s bereaved husband. A story of loss, lies, and wrongdoing, astonishingly complex and ingeniously inventive, The Night Following is the extraordinarily moving tale of a killer’s journey from the shadows into the light.

Malaparte Prize Winner, Nobel Prize Winner

Amid a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend who meets his own fateful end, to an editor struggling against censorship, to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories, and to Dong-ho’s own grief-stricken mother, and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope, is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.