The Books Valley

Three novelettes about finding love WHEN and WHERE you least expect it.

Garrett and Carissa
When Carissa escapes her abusive boyfriend with their daughter, she never expects to be thrown into medieval Ireland. Even after she is rescued by Garrett McKinley, she is determined to survive on her own. But there’s something about the mysterious laird that is drawing her in just as she is determined to push him away.

Wade and Chloe
After a terrible event left her pregnant and alone, Chloe had sworn to herself she would never trust a man again. When her son inherits both title and land from his biological father, Chloe pours all her energy into ensuring he turns out nothing like the man who sired him. But when a man shows up on the doorsteps of her castle insisting she is in danger and begging her to trust him, she is tempted to let him in.

Leon and Ashleigh
Dr. Ashleigh Hutchinson has made a good life for herself and her daughter after her jerk of a boyfriend ran out on them. That life is turned upside down one night when a women shows up on her doorstep begging for her help and Ashleigh finds herself in the middle of a castle, in the company of a dying man and her best friend who’s been missing for six months.

Get your Kindle copy on Amazon!

A mysterious fire in a remote forest clearing; a woman’s charred bones; unexplained tracks in the rutted road—the only clues Deputy Andi Pelton has to what happened. Then she meets an old man living alone in a forest compound that obviously houses many people. Sex trafficking in the Montana wilderness? As Andi and psychologist Ed Northrup struggle to solve the brutal and fiery murder, Andi faces a fear she didn’t know she had. The horrors they unearth lead them deep into the appalling reality of prison gangs and a cult led by a malign Bishop—and threaten to overwhelm Andi and Ed’s romance and her growing bond with her “step-girlfriend,” Ed’s adopted daughter, Grace. Will that center hold when Andi finds the killer holding a knife against her throat? And if it does and she succeeds, will she be able to face her greater fear?

Get your Kindle copy on Amazon!

People die, but legends live on.

Get it on Amazon!

New York antiquities appraiser Annalisse Drury recently lost her best friend to murder. The killer’s identity may be linked to her friend’s expensive missing bracelet—a 500-year-old artifact that carries an ancient curse, one that unleashes evil upon any who dare wear the jewelry created for the Persian royal family.

Weeks later, Annalisse sees a matching necklace at a Manhattan gallery opening. She begs the owner to destroy the cursed piece, but her pleas fall on deaf ears—despite the unnatural death that occurs during the opening. With two victims linked to the jewelry, Annalisse is certain she must act.

Desperate, Annalisse enlists the gallery owner’s son to help—even though she’s afraid he’ll break her heart. Wealthy and devastatingly handsome, with a string of bereft women in his wake, Greek playboy Alec Zavos dismisses Annalisse’s concerns—until his parents are ripped from the Zavos family yacht during their ocean voyage near Crete.

Annalisse and Alec race across two oceans to save his mother, feared dead or kidnapped. When the killer changes tactics and goes after Alec behind Annalisse’s back, can her plan to rescue Alec’s mother save them all?

Hold on for a heart-thumping, thrilling adventure through exotic lands in this fast-moving romantic suspense mystery by Marlene M. Bell.

FREE on Amazon!

She likes picking up her camera because it allows her to see things through a different lens. Like when she lost her job recently and instead of focusing on what she’s forced to leave behind, she zooms in on the new options opening up in front of her. Or when a dangerous looking silver fox comes rolling up her path on a FatBoy, and her digital output shows a deep loneliness, matching her own, in his ice-blue eyes.
But when she’s working on making her dreams come true, she inadvertently captures something in her viewfinder she can’t un-see.

He wasn’t supposed to be here, but he can’t seem to escape his old life. Stuck in an old trailer in the mountains, he walks a fine line between ruse and reality. With the arrival of a young-looking pixie—who turns out to be a full grown, hot-blooded woman—his balance is thrown.
He tries to avoid her, but with the little pixel peeper snapping everything in sight, she unintentionally risks his exposure.

And his focus needs to be sharp to keep her from danger.

USA Today bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith takes you into the world of his acclaimed novel Dead Money with a new series about a group of retired Las Vegas Police detectives playing poker and solving cold cases.

FREE on Amazon!

Retired Detective Bayard Lott hosts the weekly poker games at his home. The group calls themselves the Cold Poker Gang. And they succeed at closing old cases.

Lott’s very first homicide case as a brand-new detective had gone cold more than twenty years earlier. But retired Reno detective Julia Rogers, new to the Cold Poker Gang, suggests they look at that case again for personal reasons.

From that simple suggestion spins one of the strangest and most complicated murder mystery puzzles the gang has ever seen.