Now Win This!: The Awful Octavo Sweepstakes

Each one of these eight exciting titles can be a new leaf in your awful awesome 2014!

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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 January 7, 2013, at 12:00 pm ET, and ends January 21, 2013, 11:59 am ET. Void in Puerto Rico and wherever prohibited by law. Click here for details and official rules.

Hunting Shadows by Charles Todd

In 1920s England, a dangerous case with ties leading back to the battlefields of World War I dredges up dark memories for Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge. A society wedding at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire becomes a crime scene when a man is murdered. After another body is found, the baffled local constabulary turns to Scotland Yard. Though the second crime had a witness, her description of the killer is so strange its unbelievable.

Despite his experience, Inspector Ian Rutledge has few answers of his own. The victims are so different that there is no rhyme or reason to their deaths. As the investigation widens, a clear suspect emerges. But for Rutledge, the facts still don’t add up, and he's reminded of a dark episode he witnessed in the war. To stop a murderer, will the ethical detective choose to follow the letter—or the spirit—of the law?

 

The Execution by Dick Wolf

NYPD Detective Jeremy Fisk must stop an assassin in the pay of a shadowy cartel in The Execution. Ten days after the Mexican presidential election, twenty-three bodies are discovered beheaded on the United States border, each marked with a carving of a Hummingbird. Detective Cecilia Garza of the Mexican intelligence agency recognizes it: it is the signature of an assassin called Chuparosa. Garza has been pursuing the killer for years, yet knows little about him, except that he’s heading to New York—with the rest of the world.

It’s United Nations Week in Manhattan, and Jeremy Fisk can’t let grief over a devastating loss keep him from safeguarding his city. Complicating matters is the startling news of a mass murder in nearby Rockaway—and the arrival of a disturbingly beautiful and assertive Mexican cop.

 

Delivering Death by Julie Kramer

TV reporter Riley Spartz is a star investigative journalist for Channel 3 —and no stranger to the seedier side of her hometown. But when she receives a package of human teeth in the mail at work, she’s quickly embroiled in a homicide investigation that spirals into one of the odder cases the Minneapolis police force has ever seen. Though the cops try to keep certain grisly details quiet, this murder has a strange twist—it seems that the killer wants the crime publicized.

Is it a revenge killing, or something more? Riley’s investigation takes her inside a lucrative identity theft ring that links low-life crooks to white-collar opportunists. While Riley pushes to keep the homicide in the news, her boss is convinced that coverage of the Mall of America’s unique version of a royal wedding is key to the station’s winning ratings. As the stakes continue to rise for her job and her life, Riley must outwit the killer in a trap that could leave yet another person dead.

 

That Old Black Magic by Mary Jane Clark

Aspiring actress and wedding-cake decorator Piper Donovan has barely arrived in New Orleans to perfect her pastry skills at the renowned French Quarter bakery Boulangerie Bertrand when a ghastly murder rocks the magical city.

Intrigued by the case, Piper can't help but look for the “Hoodoo Killer” among the faces around her. Could it be the handsome guide eager to give her special private tours? Or the inscrutable jazz musician who plays on historic Royal Street? What about the ratings-starved radio talk-show host? Or even the amiable owner of the local Gris-Gris Bar? Though Piper has a full plate, she's also landed an exciting but unnerving role in a movie being shot in the Big Easy. When the murderer strikes again, Piper will have to conjure up some old black magic of her own if she hopes to live long enough to reveal the truth.

 

The Poisoned Island by Lloyd Shepherd

Tahiti 1769. English sailors arrive on the shores of the Polynesian paradise— a place of staggering beauty where magic and ancient myths still hold sway. But they soon devastate the island with disease, war, and death, planting deadly seeds that will be carried back to England forty years later.

London 1812. On a gray June morning, the Solander docks, her hold containing hundreds of exotic plants from Tahiti for the King’s Gardens at Kew. The apparently successful expedition soon takes a horrifying— and inexplicable—turn: The crew of the Solander starts dying one by one. Thames River Police Chief Charles Horton can find no signs of murder or suicide to explain the deaths, and the ship’s surviving crew seems intent on hampering his investigation. When one of the plants begins to show frightening changes, it is up to Charles Horton to determine how it might be stopped.

 

The Little Boy Inside and Other Stories by Glenn Gray

What men do to their bodies and what their bodies do to them. That's the subject of this visceral debut story collection from Glenn Gray, who brings his singular voice to an unholy genre all his own. In these seventeen remarkable stories, bodies harbor secrets, slough off the past, and morph in grotesque, absurd ways.

Doctors are required to do no harm, but not writers like Glenn Gray. His characters — doctors and patients, body builders and drug dealers — take up permanent residence in our imaginations, leaving us amazed, damaged, and transformed forever.

 

The House on the Cliff by Charlotte Williams

Jessica Mayhew is a sharp, successful therapist with a thriving practice and loving family. But the arrival of a new client, actor Gwydion Morgan, coincides with a turbulent moment in her life: her husband has just confessed to a one-night stand with a younger woman. The son of a famous stage director, Gwydion is good-looking and talented but mentally fragile, tormented by an intriguing phobia. When Jessica receives a frantic call warning that he is suicidal, she decides to make a house call.

The Morgans live in a grand clifftop mansion overlooking the rocky Welsh coast. It seems to be a remote paradise, but there's something sinister about it too: Jessica learns that the family's former au pair drowned in the bay under mysterious circumstances. In her quest to help Gwydion, to whom she's grown increasingly attached, Jessica becomes ensnared in the Morgan family mystery, which soon becomes an explosive public scandal—one that puts her directly in harm's way. Meanwhile, Jessica is doing her best to keep her marriage and family together, but her growing attraction to Gwydion is impossible to ignore.

 

The Wrong Quarry by Max Allan Collins

A HIT. AND A MISS.
 
Quarry doesn't kill just anybody these days. He restricts himself to targeting other hitmen, availing his marked-for-death clients of two services: eliminating the killers sent after them, and finding out who hired them…and then removing that problem as well. 
 
So far he's rid of the world of nobody who would be missed. But this time he finds himself zeroing in on the grieving family of a missing cheerleader. Does the hitman's hitman have the wrong quarry in his sights?

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