Mailbox Monday 07.18.11

Hosted this month by A Sea of Books.

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week (checked out library books don’t count, eBooks & audio books do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.

So, I got some money for my birthday last week, and bought a few ebooks with it to put on my Sony Reader. The first two are ones I've been really wanting and the third was a .99 cent book I saw on Smashwords that sounded really interesting.

It is the Autumn of 1943. Italy signs the armistice that will take it out of the war, and slides into chaos. In Florence, two sisters, Isabella and Caterina Cammaccio, find themselves surrounded by terror and death. As the Allied advance stalls in the south, Italy is trapped under the heel of a brutal Nazi occupation. Determined to take on not only the Nazis, but also the newly resurgent Fascists, bands of Partisans rise up. Almost all of them are young. Many of them are women. They have little to rely on except ingenuity, determination, and courage. Thrust headlong into the unknown, Isabella and Caterina will test their wits and deepest beliefs as never before. As the winter grinds on, they will be forced to make the most important decisions of their lives. Their choices will reverberate for decades. In the present day, Alessandro Pallioti, one of Florence's most senior policemen, would not normally oversee a murder investigation. He agrees only because the victim - an old man found dead in his apartment - was once a hero, one of the few surviving Partisans who took part in the city's liberation in 1944. The memories of old heroes should be nothing more than a diversion. But, as the case begins to unravel, Pallioti finds himself first pulled backwards in time, then racing against it, working to uncover a crime lost in the twilight of war the consequences of which are as deadly today as they were over sixty years ago.

In a time of intrigue and betrayal, the huntress is on a quest that could jeopardize two empires and two great queens: Catherine de Medici and Elizabeth I.

The year is 1585–and prophecy has foretold the coming of a daughter of the Earth whose powers are so extraordinary they could usurp the very rule of the Dark Queen herself, Catherine de Medici. Dispatched from Brittany to London, Catriona O’Hanlon, known as the Huntress, must find this mysterious young girl and shield her from those who will exploit her mystic abilities, which have the potential to change the course of history.

Catriona’s skill with weaponry is all she has to protect herself and her young charge from spies who snake through the courts of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen–including the girl’s own father, whose loyalties are stretched to the breaking point. But Catriona will soon face menacing forces and sinister plots unlike any she has ever encountered.

Book #4 in The Dark Queen Saga.

Minerva Peabody needs a man. Unfortunately she picked the wrong one. The impoverished playwright has a dream to see her plays performed on stage but in Elizabethan England, not only are women considered the inferior sex, they simply do NOT write plays. Faced with rejection after rejection, she decides to take one more chance with the most desperate theater manager in London, only this time she'll use the cover of a man. Sucked in by a pair of bright blue eyes and impressive shoulders, she chooses Blake out of the crowd, never thinking he'll actually play an active role in her ruse. But when he does, he gets under her skin in the most alarming way.

Privateer (don't call him a pirate to his face), Robert Blakewell, accepted Min's proposal in order to discover which cur among Lord Hawkesbury's Players got his sister with child. But when his mission threatens to destroy Min's fledgling career, he must make a choice: protect his family or the woman he has grown to love. Either choice will see him lose something precious.

A SECRET LIFE is a romp through Elizabethan England and features cameo appearances from William Shakespeare.