Friday, September 21, 2012

Friday Freebie: The Dark Rose, Kings of Colorado, A Young Wife and Moonlight Mile


Congratulations to Cindi Hoppes, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Vandal Love and Cures for Hunger by Deni Y. Bechard from Milkweed Editions.

Congratulations are also in order for Andrea Peacock, winner of the year's membership in The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.  Andrea will be receiving a book a month from Brad Listi and the good folks at TNB.

Happy Reading to both of you!

This week's book giveaway is informally called "Clear the Shelf of All Those Friday Freebies Which Have Been Hanging Around for Months."  The books do pile up on the desk here at Quivering Pen Headquarters on a weekly basis and, every once in a while, I need to have a big purge.  This time around, you're the beneficiary of said purge.

Up for grabs this week for ONE lucky reader: a hardcover copy of The Dark Rose by Erin Kelly, and trade paperbacks of Kings of Colorado by David E. Hilton, A Young Wife by Pam Lewis, and Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane.

The Dark Rose has been winning high praise ever since it was published earlier this year.  Maureen Corrigan of NPR said “Erin Kelly is an elegant menace…It’s useless to resist: You must read it.”  Here's why, according to the publisher's blurb:
Paul was led into a life of crime by his boyhood protector, a bully named Daniel; but one night, what started as a petty theft turned into a grisly murder. Now, at nineteen, Paul must bear witness against his friend to avoid prison. Louisa's own dark secrets led her to flee a desperate infatuation gone wrong many years before. Now she spends her days steeped in history, renovating the grounds of a crumbling Elizabethan garden. But her fragile peace is shattered when she meets Paul; he's the spitting image of the one person she never thought she'd see again. These two, scarred and solitary, begin a secret affair. Louisa starts to believe she can again find the happiness she had given up on. But neither of them can outrun his violent past. A story of secrets and guilt set among the ruins of a sixteenth- century English garden, The Dark Rose explores the extremes of obsessive love and loyalty, devotion and desperation. Like Kelly's critically acclaimed debut novel, The Poison Tree, this fantastically creepy, atmospheric novel thrills until the final shocking moments.

Kings of Colorado is  “a stark novel of violence and fierce friendship in a 1960s Colorado juvenile penitentiary,” according to Publishers Weekly.  Here's the plot synopsis:
William Sheppard had never ventured beyond his Chicago neighborhood until, at thirteen, he was sent away to the Swope Ranch Boys’ Reformatory, hundreds of miles from home, for stabbing his abusive father in the chest with a pocketknife. Buried deep in the Colorado mountains, Swope is shrouded in legend and defined by one prevailing rumor: that the boys who go in never come out the same. Despite the lack of fences or gates, the boundaries are clear: prisoners are days from civilization, there exists only one accessible road—except in the wintertime, when it’s buried under feet upon feet of snow, and anyone attempting escape will be shot down without hesitation in the shadow of the peaks. At 13,000 feet above sea level, the mountains aren’t forgiving, and neither are the guards. With twenty-four months of hard time ahead of him, Will quickly learns to distinguish his allies from his enemies. He also learns about the high price of a childhood lost. At Swope, herds of mustangs are trucked in to be broken by a select group of inmates. Once the horses are gentled, they are sold to ranchers and landowners across the Southwest. Horses come and go, delinquent boys come and go. The boys break the horses, Swope Reformatory breaks the boys. Throughout this ordeal, Will discovers three others who bring him into their inner circle. They are life preservers in a sea of violence and corruption. But if the boys are to withstand the ranch, they must first overcome tragedy and death—a feat that could haunt them for years to come.

A Young Wife centers around fifteen-year-old Minke van Aisma who travels to Amsterdam to care for the dying wife of an older, wealthy man named Sander DeVries.  She has no idea what awaits her. Within hours of his wife’s death, Sander proposes marriage, and within days the couple sets sail for the burgeoning oil fields of Argentina. But the future that seemed so bright takes a dark turn the morning their son, Zef, is kidnapped. Dire circumstances dictate that Sander immigrate to New York at once, leaving Minke little choice but to wait for their new baby’s arrival, follow Sander to America, and abandon her firstborn. What follows is a triumphant turn-of-the-century story of faith, betrayal, and redemption, an indelible portrait of one woman’s struggle to steer her own fate.  Booklist had this to say about A Young Wife: “In this compelling read, Lewis beautifully captures the essence of place, from the lushness of the Netherlands to the wilds of Argentina to the inhospitable urban streets of New York.”

Fans of Dennis Lehane already know he knows how to write himself out of a paper bag with style, but Moonlight Mile cements his reputation as one of the top-notch crime-thriller writers currently at work.  This novel serves as a sequel to his previous bestseller Gone Baby Gone, in which Patrick Kenzie located missing 4-year-old Amanda McCready and returned her to her neglectful mother, even though she would have been better off with her kidnappers.  If you saw the movie version of Gone Baby Gone, you know the power of that story.  Expect great things from the follow-up book as well.  Here's the publisher's blurb for Moonlight Mile:
Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from her blue-collar Boston neighborhood. Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro risked everything to find her, only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and broken home. Twelve years later, Amanda, now sixteen, is gone again. Still haunted by their consciences, Kenzie and Gennaro must now revisit the nightmare that once tore them apart. Following the trail of a lost teenager into a world of identity thieves, methamphetamine dealers, and Russian gangsters, they once again put everything that matters to them on the line in pursuit of an answer to a troubling question: Is it possible to do the right thing and still be dead wrong?

If you'd like a chance at winning one copy of all four books--The Dark Rose, Kings of Colorado, A Young Wife and Moonlight Mile--all you have to do is email your name and mailing address to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Sept. 27at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Sept. 28.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.


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