Now Win This!: Global Getaway Sweepstakes

It's time to pack your bags and escape away from everything in these eight global getaways. Just don't forget to pack your camera!

Click here to enter for a chance to win!

This is NOT a Comments Sweepstakes. You must click the link above to enter.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. A PURCHASE DOES NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCE OF WINNING. Sweepstakes open to legal residents of 50 United States, D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec), who are 18 years or older as of the date of entry. Promotion begins April 28, 2015, at 12:00 pm ET, and ends May 12, 2015, 11:59 am ET. Void in Puerto Rico and wherever prohibited by law. Click here for details and official rules.

A June of Ordinary Murders by Conor Brady

In the 1880s the Dublin Metropolitan Police classified crime in two distinct categories. Political crimes were classed as “special,” whereas theft, robbery and even murder, no matter how terrible, were known as “ordinary.”

Dublin, June 1887: The city swelters in a long summer heat wave, the criminal underworld simmers, and with it, the threat of nationalist violence is growing. Meanwhile, the Castle administration hopes the celebration of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee will pass peacefully. Then, the mutilated bodies of a man and a child are discovered in Phoenix Park and Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow steps up to investigate. Cynical and tired, Swallow is a man living on past successes in need of a win. With the Land War at its height, the priority is to contain special crime, and these murders appear to be ordinary—and thus of lesser priority. But when the evidence suggests high-level involvement, and the body count increases, Swallow must navigate the treacherous waters of foolish superiors, political directives, and frayed tempers to solve the case, find the true murderer, and deliver justice.

 

Countdown to Mecca by Michael Savage

A plane bound for Amman, Jordan goes down in the Caspian Sea. The crash yields no survivors—save the Russian mercenary who hijacked the flight—and a cask containing an agent of unprecedented destructive potential is missing from the wreckage. A carefully plotted terrorist attack has been put into motion, and the resulting chaos might be enough to push America toward another costly war.

The one man who might be able to stop the attack is Jack Hatfield, a freelance reporter who has never shied away from controversy. After making a politically incorrect statement about Islamic extremists, he has been discredited as a journalist and left to pick up the pieces of his career. But when his half-brother Sammy calls him, saying that his neighbor Ana overheard something she shouldn't have and now both their lives are in danger, Jack realizes he's stumbled upon a conspiracy to destroy Mecca. Now he, and a group of likeminded friends on the fringes of the law, must uncover who is behind the plot and stop them—or else witness the collapse of the world into a war of mutually assured global destruction.

 

One of Us by Asne Seierstad

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the wooded island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and its reverberations. How did Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become Europe's most reviled terrorist? How did he accomplish an astonishing one-man murder spree? And how did a famously peaceful and prosperous country cope with the slaughter of so many of its young?

 

The Figaro Murders by Laura Lebrow

In 1786 Vienna, Lorenzo Da Ponte is the court librettist for the Italian Theatre during the height of the enlightened reign of Emperor Joseph II. This exalted position doesn't mean he's particularly well paid, or even out of reach of the endless intrigues of the opera world. In fact, far from it.

One morning, Da Ponte stops off at his barber, only to find the man being taken away to debtor's prison. Da Ponte impetuously agrees to carry a message to his barber's fiancée and try to help her set him free, even though he's facing pressures of his own. He's got one week to finish the libretto for The Marriage of Figaro for Mozart before the opera is premiered for the Emperor himself.

Da Ponte visits the house where the barber's fiancée works—the home of a nobleman, high in the Vienna's diplomatic circles—and then returns to his own apartments, only to be dragged from his rooms in the middle of the night. It seems the young protégé of the diplomat was killed right about the time Da Ponte was visiting, and he happens to be their main suspect. Now he's given a choice—go undercover into the household and uncover the murderer, or be hanged for the crime himself.

 

Spring Remains by Mons Kallentoft

Spring has finally arrived, filling the Swedish countryside with sunshine and flowers after a long, dark winter. The beautiful weather is lost on Detective Investigator Malin Fors, though, troubled as she is by the unexpected death of her emotionally distant mother and what it might mean for her own fragmented and dysfunctional family. But when an explosion rocks the town square, killing two young girls, leaving their mother fighting for life, and terrifying the entire community, Malin has no time to address her family’s uncertain future. Suddenly the future of her entire city is in danger, and she may be the only one who can save it…

 

The Strangler Vine by M.J. Carter

India, 1837: William Avery is a young soldier with few prospects except rotting away in campaigns in India; Jeremiah Blake is a secret political agent gone native, a genius at languages and disguises, disenchanted with the whole ethos of British rule, but who cannot resist the challenge of an unresolved mystery. What starts as a wild goose chase for this unlikely pair—trying to track down a missing writer who lifts the lid on Calcutta society—becomes very much more sinister as Blake and Avery get sucked into the mysterious Thuggee cult and its even more ominous suppression.

There are shades of Heart of Darkness, sly references to Conan Doyle, that bring brilliantly to life the India of the 1830s with its urban squalor, glamorous princely courts and bazaars, and the ambiguous presence of the British overlords—the officers of the East India Company—who have their own predatory ambitions beyond London's oversight.

 

A Love Like Blood by Marcus Sedgwick

In 1944, just days after the liberation of Paris, Charles Jackson sees something horrific: a man in a dark tunnel, apparently drinking the blood of a murdered woman. Terrified, he does nothing, telling himself afterward that worse tragedies happen during war.

Seven years later he returns to the city—and sees the same man dining in the company of a fascinating, beautiful young woman. When they leave the restaurant, Charles decides to follo.

 

Broken Chord by Margaret Moore

State Prosecutor Jacopo Dragonetti known as Drago (the dragon), makes his debut in this elegant psychological exploration of a dysfunctional family. Ursula von Bachmann made many bad decisions in her life, but the worst was to let her killer into her bedroom. In the unbearable heat of July in Tuscany, investigating magistrate Jacopo Dragonetti unravels a family history of feuds and violence. Money can buy you many things but it can’t protect you from murder, it can’t buy you love, and there is no love lost in the despotic Ursula s family. Imprisoned in the villa, they eye each other with increasing suspicion and fear. Three children by three different fathers, resentful servants, a jilted lover, and echoes from the Second World War as well as the more recent past, are the components of this complex case.