Happy Friday everyone! I hope everyone had a great week. This week was a little tough for me since it was the first full week back to work after all the holidays.
I wanted to tell you about some exciting news. I was Auto-Approved for a marketing agency in NetGalley called BookBuzz.net! Yay! What this means is that I can request any book they have added and it will be approved automatically for me. I don’t have to wait to be approved. It’s quite the honor in the NetGalley world.
So, for this week’s Friday Finds I wanted to share the books from this agency that Auto-Approved me. Feel free to post what you found this week in the comments.
Title: Death of a Diva
Author: Brigitte Goldstein
Publication Date: September 30, 2014
Genre: Mystery & Thrillers
“A veteran actress’s brutal murder at a Broadway theater in 1941 sets off a police investigation that reaches back to pre-WWI Vienna and 1920s Berlin in Brigitte Goldstein’s densely plotted noir mystery novel, Death of a Diva.
In 1941 New York, the murder on Broadway of Stella Berger, famed star of screen and stage of Weimar Germany and outspoken critic of the Nazi regime which had forced her into exile, sends shock waves through the American public.
The police act quickly, and the prime suspect, an emigrant street musician, is tried and put on death row. But Misia Safran, a young Jewish refugee from Germany and part-time employee at the theater who becomes inadvertently involved in the investigation, is haunted by the possibility of his innocence and a suspicion that there’s more to the case than meets the eye.
Determined to uncover the truth, Misia delves into Stella’s background. She patches together the life of the revered actress from testimony by those who had been closest to her throughout her rise to stardom. From accounts of her humble origins in a Viennese ghetto to her rise to the pinnacle in the acting world of 1920′s Berlin, to her battle with Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, emerges the portrait of a woman of great strength of character and resolve, albeit one that conceals a vulnerable side which ultimately may have been the cause of her undoing. As Misia cuts through a bewildering thicket of lies, hidden agendas, and deceptions, she is met with intimations of a deep secret in Stella’s past, evidence of which may be stored in the vault of a Swiss bank. If made public, this secret could provide the clue to the mystery, but could also destroy the star’s carefully guarded public persona.”
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Title: The Experiment of Dreams
Author: Brandon Zenner
Publication Date: January 1, 2015
Genre: Mystery & Thrillers
“A machine capable of recording our dreams has been created…
Benjamin Walker’s lifelong career of testing experimental drugs and medicines, as well as participating in fascinating sleep-related studies, has come to an end. A new and lucrative job opportunity is offered to Ben, working on a project named Lucy, a machine capable of reading and recording a person’s dreams in intimate detail. Headed by the genius Dr. Peter Wulfric and privately funded by the elusive millionaire, Mr. Timothy Kalispell (a man with a fascination of the arts that borders on the obsessive) takes Ben all over the world, from the Louvre in Paris to the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Along his travels, Ben meets a beautiful girl named Sophia, who might just help him overcome his crushing depression over the death of his lost love, his Emily. All is finally going well for Ben . . . until strange dreams of a town named Drapery Falls begin to plague him, and memories once hidden begin to reveal themselves. The doctors and staff onboard team Lucy are not who Ben thinks they are, and Mr. Kalispell will stop at nothing to keep Ben’s emerging memories buried for good. Ben is put on a collision course that will bring him to the brink of total insanity, and perhaps even death. At the heart of it all, Ben’s worst enemy is his own mind, and he must confront his past in order to save his future.”
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Title: After Midnight
Author: Diane Shute
Publication Date: September 16, 2014
Genre: Women’s Ficition
“When horse breeder Alix is forced to temporarily swap places with her estranged twin sister—the wife of an English lord—her forgotten past begins to resurface. A humorous historical fiction mystery with charismatic, realistic characters, After Midnight offers the young adult and woman’s fiction market a fresh, engaging perspective.”
Stories Unfolded 