Kindle Daily Post

New on Kindle: Hidden Expedition: Amazon

Hidden Expedition: Amazon is a hidden object game set deep in the jungle.

Featuring a story never before told in the Hidden Expedition franchise, you join the Hidden Expedition Team in search of a professor lost in the Amazon rainforest. You get to explore cities, temples, and ruins while unlocking the secrets of the professor’s groundbreaking research by finding objects hidden within pictures. With a tattered passport as your only clue, embark on an adventure and investigate 19 beautiful levels and 4 brain teasing mini-games.

You can invite up to 3 your friends and family to create their own profiles so they can play without disturbing your own adventure. Take advantage of the dynamic Hint system whenever your search becomes too difficult. Enjoy a scene? Replay any level as many times as you wish with the Chapter Select feature and pursue randomly selected items in that scene.

If you’re seeking adventure, lush landscapes, and a good challenge, journey into the wonderful world of Hidden Expedition: Amazon.

Summer Storm: A Novel of Suspense ($2.99)

Kristina Dunker’s Summer Storm begins unassumingly enough:  Annie and her friends are enjoying a lazy day of sunbathing by the lake when a storm gathers on the horizon. Anxious to escape the deluge, the kids quickly gather their things and prepare to leave. But then Annie realizes her cousin Gina is missing. The girl was just there…wasn’t she? After a fruitless search in the rain, the teens call the police. As the hours tick by, Annie’s fears mount.

How could someone disappear without a trace? Didn’t anyone notice anything?

Crippled by guilt for her failure to keep tabs on her cousin, Annie turns for support to the friends who were with them on that fateful afternoon. But her search for comfort uncovers a suspicious connection between the disappearance and one of her own circle. As the evidence mounts, the accused does nothing to clarify the situation. Slipping out of denial, Annie discovers that her friends are not at all what they seemed.

Dunker’s taut and sparse prose creates a haunting atmosphere and a tight suspense that plays upon readers’ fears. Diving into Summer Storm is like taking a cool dip in classic young adult suspense that’s enjoyable for readers of any age.  Forget vampires and dystopian worlds— this story, like the writing of Carolyn B. Cooney (The Face on the Milk Carton) or Gary Paulsen (Hatchet), is all the more gripping because it could so easily happen to any of us.

Summer Storm is available on Kindle for $2.99

New to Kindle: Novels by Susan Isaacs

Though she can’t admit it to herself, Judith Singer is bored.  Positively bored.  Each morning she kisses her husband goodbye on his way to work, and each evening she fixes him dinner. Three nights a week, they make tepid love. Life in their Long Island split-level is a ho-hum affair, and when a local dentist is murdered in his office, Judith’s curiosity gets the better of her.

Susan Isaacs is a New York Times bestselling author of mysteries and literary fiction. Born in Brooklyn, she worked in New York politics before writing her first mystery, Compromising Positions, in 1978, which The New York Times called “deliciously mean,” and the rest is history. Now, four of her novels are newly available to Kindle readers. If you’re new to her work, we recommend starting at the beginning.

In Compromising Positions, a classic mystery of the dark side of suburbia, a Long Island housewife investigates the murder of a local dentist.

Judith soon learns that Dr. Fleckstein’s private life wasn’t as immaculate as his smile, and anyone in town might be the murderer. And when her neighbor becomes the chief suspect, Judith must find the real killer or risk losing her only friend in all of suburbia.

A runaway success, the story of a housewife-turned-detective was adapted into a film starring Susan Sarandon and Raul Julia.

Chairman of the literary organization Poets & Writers and a former president of the Mystery Writers of America, Isaacs is a winner of the John Steinbeck Award, the Marymount Manhattan Writing Center Award, and the Writers for Writers Award. She lives and works on Long Island.

Don’t miss these Susan Isaacs titles new to Kindle, which feature an illustrated biography of Susan Isaacs, including rare photos from the author’s personal collection: Any Place I Hang My Hat, Compromising Positions, Long Time No See, and Past Perfect.

Author Spotlight: Adam Mansbach on "Go the F**k to Sleep"

I’ve been collaborating with Ricardo Cortes, the illustrator of Go the F**k to Sleep, since the day we met.

Let me set the scene for you: It was the spring of 1990, and I was a fourteen-year-old aspiring rapper--the youngest and whitest member of a ten-piece collective called Imperial Triqualm. These were the days when every name in hip-hop had to double as an acronym, however forced, and so in addition to being a cool-sounding word invented by our frontman, Slim Rhyme the Superhero, Triqualm stood for Tranquil Rhythmic Individuals Quite Ubiquitous Among Luminous Mortals.  There was nothing particularly Imperial about us, as far as I can recall.  

The early ‘90s were heady days for hip-hop.  The music was reaching new heights of political fervor, exposing the inequalities in American life with a poetry and a passion that were in scarce supply anywhere else. I sincerely believed that KRS-One might learn to control objects with his mind at any moment. There was no doubt in the minds of The Hip-Hop Nation that this music would play a profound role in reshaping the world.

As it turned out, we were right about that, in ways far too complex to unpack here.  But this was also Boston--a city so racist people called it “the South of the North,” and so segregated that almost all the black kids at my suburban high school, including about 90% of Imperial Triqualm, were bused in from the inner city.  Hip-hop had not yet attained mainstream acceptance, even if MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice were tearing up the pop charts. All of which meant that whenever Imperial Triqualm entered a talent contest, we inevitably lost to three girls in spandex shorts doing the Electric Slide.

This day, though, was different. The Courtyard Jam was an annual concert, featuring a long lineup of bands from my high school and the one across town. There was only one other rap act: a duo made up of a lanky guy with long, wild-looking dreadlocks and a shorter, bespectacled dude with a muted, mad-scientist vibe.  Naturally, we eyed them dubiously.

It was a scorching day, and before long the records our DJ was playing for us to rhyme over began to melt into puddles of black wax, right on the turntables. What happened next is a blur--one of those experiences you can’t quite reconstruct, but that makes your heart soar a little every time you think about it.

A punk band on the bill--guys none of us even knew, really--ran up on stage and bailed us out, the drummer hammering out a beat we could rhyme over and the other guys laying down a decidedly non-punk groove. Today, live hip-hop bands are everywhere, but in 1990, such things were unheard of. In fact, hip-hop was under such constant attack that we were conditioned to assume anybody doing any other kind of music was probably hostile to our stuff.

The audience cheered, and the next thing I knew, the two guys from the other high school were up there with us--six or seven MCs passing the mic and freestyling, in a giddy, live demonstration of camaraderie, improvisation, and can-do spirit.  That was hip-hop in a nutshell, back then: the simple act of shared participation was enough to build a friendship on.

The guy with the crazy-ass dreadlocks was Ricardo. Twenty-one years later--crazily enough--here we are at the top of the bestseller’s list. We took it from the stage to the page, and Ricardo cut his hair, but nothing’s really changed.  We’re still rhyming together.  

Crimescape, a True Crime Series Exclusively on Kindle

This post is written by Paul Alexander, author of the true crime Kindle Singles, Murdered and Accused.

I’ve been writing journalism for over 25 years. In that time, I’ve published eight books and more than 100 articles for magazines like Rolling Stone; I’m especially proud of the pieces I contributed to George, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s groundbreaking political magazine. Despite the million-plus words of nonfiction I’ve published, I had never indulged working in a genre I’d long loved to read--true crime.
 
My two favorite books, in any genre, are The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer’s shattering chronicle of Gary Gilmore, and In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s masterpiece about murder in Kansas that remains a true-crime bestseller 46 years after it was first published.
 
I was finally able to tackle the true-crime genre this year when I published my first Kindle Single, Murdered. It involves a cold case in Los Angeles about Sherri Rasmussen, a beautiful medical administrator savagely murdered in her home in 1986, that was solved through the brilliant work of LAPD detective James Nuttall 23 years after the crime was committed.  My second Single, Accused, documents the disturbing story of Houston police officer Tommy Harris, who in 2009 was charged with homicide, culminating in an explosive trial.  Publishing Murdered and Accused has opened a whole new world for me.
 
I had a chance to read all six of the first pieces of Crimescape, a new true-crime series in the vein of Kindle Singles featuring 10,000 to 20,000-word narratives about compelling stories. The writers are true-crime professionals gathered by Marilyn Bardsley, founder of Crime Library. I particularly enjoyed Mom: The Killer by Mark Gado, a skillfully told tale about a shocking series of crimes.
 
From the response to Murdered and Accused, I know there is a large, fervent audience for contemporary true crime. It’s been an eye-opening experience for me. Crimescape is a welcomed addition to the genre.

--Paul Alexander

Kindle Singles: Six Months In

It's 2:15 in the morning in New York City, and I've just finished editing a sweet, endearing new Kindle Single by a freelance film critic in southern Michigan. It's called The Sum Of My Parts, and yes, it's a reference to those parts--James Sanford contracted testicular cancer and had the balls to tell a compelling tale of male insecurity and fear. He'd posted his 20,000-word saga for sale a few weeks ago in the Kindle Store, and emailed me to ask if I'd make it a Kindle Single. I read it and said yes.

Its posting marks the six-month birthday of Kindle Singles. With nearly 80 Kindle Singles now for sale, our store has stuck religiously to the liberating notion of "Compelling Ideas Expressed at Their Natural Length"--a guiding philosophy that has led us to a thoughtful essay on a 17th century Japanese Haiku poet, a pulsing narrative of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and the chilling true story of a Los Angeles cop who murdered her boyfriend's wife. All were bestsellers–-a message of hope to writers with compelling stories to tell.

We launched Kindle Singles late one Tuesday night in January, gathered around our laptops in Seattle and New York City, as we prepared to push the button on our birth. The brilliant journalist Ron Rosenbaum took a flyer on us with an essay on the nature of evil, and Vanity Fair's star reporter Rich Cohen slipped us a cool insider's profile of the Hollywood legend John Milius. Thank you, Pete Hamill, for letting us post your provocative views on illegal immigration, and kudos to sitcom writer/producer Claudia Lonow for sharing painfully hilarious stories of her rude sexual awakening .Since then, we've promoted some remarkable young talents--Erik German, Mishka Shubaly, Oliver Broudy, and Mara Altman all delivered brilliant, bestselling Kindle Singles--and showcased powerful essays from the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Susan Orlean, Plum Sykes, and Tim Gunn.

Keep watching; we're just getting started. And if you're a writer with a compelling Kindle Single in your computer, we're launching a new submissions page today, designed to explain and clarify who we are, what we do and how to get your work considered. Our email address is kindle-singles@amazon.com, and we're prepared to be surprised and thrilled by what you send. We're only the sum of our parts, after all.

Author Spotlight: Jenny Wingfield on "The Homecoming of Samuel Lake"

Dear Readers,

When I was writing The Homecoming of Samuel Lake, and anyone asked me what my book was about, I’d tell them that it was “kind of about my family.”

And it was.  It is.  Kind of.  But it’s a yarn, not a true story.  Some of the events really happened, and several of the characters are modeled after members of my family.  Others (Toy, for instance) are composites of several people.  And then there were the ones who appeared out of nowhere, demanding to be included.

Growing up, most of what I knew about my mother’s family, I learned in the short stints every summer when Daddy would load us all up and haul us to Arkansas to visit while he attended annual conference. 

For a kid--especially a preacher’s kid, who was used to living in a parsonage and being expected to behave--that one week each June was heaven.  The sun and the creek and the hayloft provided the backdrop for our imaginary adventures.  We ran relatively wild, and no one cared, as long as we didn’t hurt each other or get ourselves killed.  There was no Ras Ballenger living next door, and the only dangers we encountered were the ones we spun out of thin air.

My uncles were, to me, the most fascinating men in the world.  Strong, laid-back, economical with words.  When they did speak, it often took a minute for a youngster to figure out whether they were joking or serious.  The little twinkle in their eyes was the only hint.

Once I got this bunch together on paper, they all started acting up, showing considerable disregard for the storyline I had labored over.  They had their own lives to live, thank you very much, and they were determined to do it their way.   

I was constantly surprised.  Sometimes horrified.  When I introduced Ras Ballenger, I understood what sort of man he was, but I had no idea what he was going to do.  Would I have left him out, had I known?  Good question. But once that red Apache pickup stopped in front of Calla’s store, there was no turning back. 

What started out to be a light-hearted story about a preacher-without-a-church who found himself living one thin wall away from a boisterous honky-tonk became a tale of good versus evil.  There were days when I would wake up and think, “Wait a minute.  I never intended for this thing to get so serious.”

What I had intended to do was to make people laugh and cry and feel better all over.  I never meant to tell about cruelty, scare anybody or give my readers (should I be fortunate enough to have them) a villain to despise.  Then Ras Ballenger slithered into the mix, and from that moment on, the other characters were about as safe as they’d have been if a poisonous snake had gotten into their house--and they didn’t know it was there.

Of course, while they were happily unaware of impending peril, they did laugh a lot.  And love madly.  And make music.  And grow.  Thank God for all that.

For everyone who has read Homecoming, I hope the story did what all stories are supposed to do--carried you away--and I thank you from my soul for the hours you’ve spent with my family and me. 

Happy reading and miracles when you need them,

--Jenny Wingfield

Guest Blogger: William Nicholson on "I Could Love You"

William Nicholson discusses the inspiration for his latest novel, I Could Love You.

When I first fell in love with reading novels, what I responded to most powerfully were the stories of people like me--they may have been in Czarist Russia, but through the writer’s skill I found they thought and felt like me, and I identified with the characters. Those great writers’ insights into how we live and who we are have stayed with me ever since. This simple enterprise--using fiction as a mirror of the readers’ world, and a microscope to examine it more closely--has fallen a little out of fashion; but it remains for me the highest form of writing. It demands insight, wisdom, an acute eye, and the capacity for compassion.

For some time now I’ve been embarking on the project of chronicling contemporary middle class life in its most ordinary forms. My underlying assumption is that ‘ordinary’ lives are as intensely and often painfully lived as any other, if only we can look closely enough. I also believe that we mostly lie to each other about how happy we are, and how successful we feel; and oddly, though we see through our own lies, we believe everyone else’s. This leaves us frightened and dissatisfied with what we suppose to be our own unique failure. The power of insightful storytelling is that we learn the truth about each other, and so our lives become more bearable.

Significantly, I write about the domestic arena as a man. This doesn’t mean I set out to give only the man’s viewpoint: I make great efforts to ‘be’ a woman when writing my female characters. But I do possess the man’s perspective. My greatest love is wife, home and family, but as a man I understand, for example, why men seek sexual adventure.

So for my latest novel, I Could Love You, I decided to write a book about an adulterous affair. My plan was to give full weight to the damage done to wife and home, but also to tell it from the man’s point of view. Why do men with perfectly happy marriages still want sex with other women? What happens when they give in to their desires? Is it the ultimate betrayal?

I write also about the agony of teenage love, and about the disappointments of outliving your own talent, and so much more. My characters live on from book to book, so that I can delve ever deeper into their lives. They could be Russian for all it matters--as it happens they’re British - but the only test of my writing is, do you find they think and feel like you?

New on Kindle: Cocktail Mixer

Cocktail Mixer is a collection of recipes for 350 delicious drinks including classic cocktails, seasonal drinks, the coolest new mixes and a selection of non-alcoholic drinks.

The cocktail browser feature helps you find your perfect cocktail by organizing them into easy to use sections. Sections include classic cocktails, shooters, non-alcoholic cocktails, cocktails by base ingredient, cocktails by glass type and a range of occasion and party themes. The advanced search function also lets you search for cocktails by name or cocktails that contain specific ingredients which makes it easy to explore new drinks you're likely to enjoy.

You can keep track of all your favorite drinks using the 'My Favorites' function, and you can learn about cocktail making and ingredients in the comprehensive help section. Cocktail Mixer will help you get the taste you're looking for in your old favorites, and can introduce you to new drinks that may become new favorites.

Start mixing it up today with Cocktail Mixer.

Author Spotlight: Ben Mezrich on “Sex on the Moon”

To be honest, the first time I met Thad Roberts, the main character in my new book Sex On The Moon, I was terrified; he’d just spent seven and a half years in a federal prison for stealing a safe full of moon rocks from a high security NASA laboratory, and I had never met anyone who had done that much time in prison before.   I didn’t know what to expect, just that this brilliant kid had done something utterly crazy, and that this was a story virtually unknown to the rest of the world. To my happy surprise, Thad was even more interesting than the heist he’d pulled off--complex, charismatic, brilliant, and slightly dangerous. The perfect main character--I was immediately hooked.

Sex On The Moon is as wild a tale as its title; Thad Roberts, a college student and co-op at NASA, a genius stand-out student chasing the dream of becoming an astronaut, fell in love with a 19-year-old girl and decided to impress her by giving her the moon--literally. In his third year in the prestigious NASA program, he broke into a highly secure lab and stole a six hundred pound safe full of moon rocks; unbeknownst to him, the safe contained a piece of the moon from every moon landing in history. These moon rocks--the most valuable items on earth, illegal to own, illegal to sell--were a national treasure, (a single ounce of moon rock once went on sale for 5 million dollars)- and Thad had pulled off one of the most impressive heists in world history.  And Thad was happy to take me through his amazing tale.

Ever since my book Bringing Down The House (turned into the movie 21) about the MIT Blackjack team, and especially since my last book The Accidental Billionaires was turned into the movie The Social Network (which won 3 Academy Awards including best adapted screenplay)--I’ve come across true stories about young  geniuses pulling off high stakes schemes. It’s a fun niche, for sure--I get to live vicariously through my characters, in fact often I get to join in on the fun and become a part of the story. But in my career, I’ve never written about anything as thrilling as Thad’s heist.

I’ve always been fascinated by NASA, and I’ve tried to capture the magic of the space program as it is today--not only as it was back in the 60’s, which is how we all still think of NASA--especially as we move on from the shuttle program and onto the new shared dream--the quest for Mars.

And then there’s the drama of the heist itself--was Thad driven by love? Money? Or something else, something more complex? Sex On The Moon is a story unlike any other I’ve written, and after a year spent digging into every aspect of the tale, I believe it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. And personally, I think it’s also going to make one hell of a movie. :-)