📚🍉 July Amazon First Reads – Chill Out with a Free Book

From a girl’s abduction by a serial killer to the harrowing aftermath—a gripping and heart-wrenching true-crime story by Gregg Olsen, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of If You Tell.In May 2005, authorities discovered the Groene family murdered in their Idaho home. The family’s youngest members—eight-year-old Shasta and her brother, nine-year-old Dylan—were nowhere to be found.As a community prayed for their return, Shasta and Dylan were already miles away in the woods of Montana at the hands of serial killer Joseph Edward Duncan. After a harrowing forty-eight day ordeal, Shasta was rescued. In many ways, her survival story was only beginning.In the following years, while Shasta struggled to outrun her trauma, a pattern of self-destructive behavior shadowed her like an ever-worsening thunderstorm. She still had hope buried deep inside. Every bit as much as the little girl who had been held captive in the woods. This would be an all-new battle for Shasta. And she was determined not to lose.

Out of the Woods is the haunting and intimate true-crime story of one of the most notorious criminal cases in American history—and a young woman’s journey to reclaim her life in its wake.

In Taiwan, the bond between grandmother and granddaughter opens up a healing world for them both in an inspiring family saga about the comfort of food, untold histories, and indomitable mother love.

Chef Liv Kuo’s star is on the rise…until a traumatic incident leaves her emotionally unable to venture outside her Manhattan apartment. But an unexpected reason to break free comes from Ah-Ma, Liv’s beloved grandmother in Taiwan. Ah-Ma needs Liv’s help in finding her fourth daughter, taken from her when the girl was an infant. After all these years, it seems impossible. It’s also a mystery: Ah-Ma’s fourth daughter is an aunt Liv never even knew existed.

After landing in Taiwan, Liv hears the heartbreaking story of her grandmother’s plight in a country once under martial law, of choices made for her, and of the hopeful search for a lost girl that has endured for more than sixty years. Like the enriching food and traditions that bind Liv and Ah-Ma, their journey for answers brings them together.

And it’s a quest that turns up both a precious old cookbook and a tale of fatal betrayal that shakes everything Liv believed about her family—revelations that could also give her the courage to face the trauma she left behind.

A female codebreaker puts her future and her heart on the line in a stirring novel about love, loyalty, betrayal, and Cold War spy games by the bestselling author of The Secret Stealers.

1947: Adventurous Radcliffe graduate Catherine “Cat” Killeen cancels her wedding and upends a future that no longer suits her. At the behest of her professor and hungry for a challenge, Cat arrives in Virginia to work on a confidential military project. A student in cryptoanalysis, Cat is already ahead of the game—to assist in rooting out Soviet spies who have infiltrated the US.

Joining the “government girls” of Arlington Hall, Cat gains the respect of her superiors and the friendship of her peers. Then, on a night out in DC, Cat runs into Jonathan Dardis, her arrogant and privileged Harvard rival and newly minted agent for the FBI. What Cat and Jonathan share is a competitive drive and an attraction that’s becoming just as spirited. They’re also united in the same critical goal for America. Together, they’re diving deep into the shadows of espionage.

The stakes of the codebreaking operation grow ever higher, and Cat’s relationship with Jonathan opens her heart. Amid dangerous intrigue and grave secrecy, Cat is ready for every risk—no matter how personal the stakes get.

From New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison comes a twisted psychological thriller about the bonds of family and the disconnect between memory and the truth.

Come here. Come closer.

Halley James knows her marriage is over. But she’s not prepared for the rest of her life to fall apart too.

No one can hear you. No one can help you.

She just lost her job at the forensics lab. Her dad needs emergency surgery. But the biggest blow comes back home in Marchburg, Virginia, where she discovers her mother didn’t actually die in a car crash. Her mom was murdered—and her father lied about it all these years.

I have nothing to hide from you. Are you hiding something from me?

Since she was six years old, it’s been Halley and her dad. Now, she doesn’t know what to believe. Desperate for the truth, Halley chases down a lead in Brockville, Tennessee. But all there is not as it seems. Brockville’s utopian charm hides a chilling darkness. And Halley’s search for answers threatens to expose an unspeakable reality.

She’s ready to experiment with life… What about love?

Incredibly resilient and determined to rewrite the possibilities of life with a chronic illness, Penny is ready to leave her family behind and go to college by herself, accompanied by a snazzy new wheelchair and a backpack full of confidence.

When she meets the charming actor CJ, who is studying the same course, there’s an immediate spark. But Penny worries that her life isn’t fast-paced enough for CJ and assumes they’re better off as friends.

But Penny and CJ find themselves inspiring each other, and gradually discover, as they put their feelings under the microscope, that leaning on another person can be a sign of strength, not weakness. Because when it comes to the science of romance, the first rule is: never ignore your own chemistry…

A swoonworthy and utterly gorgeous STEM college romance that will melt your heart and have you flying through the pages. If you love forced proximity and grumpy/sunshine, The Chemistry Test is for you!

An ingenious novel of suspense about sisterhood, innocence, murderous games, and how far we’ll go to protect the ones we love.

In a tight-knit town in the 1980s, a child-killer is on the loose. And Topaz’s parents are on edge. At ten years old, Topaz is so vulnerable. But she has nothing to worry about. Her eldest sister, Ruby, has made sure of that. Swearing Topaz to secrecy, Ruby reveals she has trapped the monster in their root cellar.

Bound and bloodied in the cold space is kindly Brother Johnson from the Church. Pleading with Topaz to cut him loose, he says her reckless sister is a liar. Brother Johnson is right about that: Ruby does lie. She also likes to scare people. Still, even Ruby wouldn’t lie about this. Would she? The game—and the secret—is in her hands. But Topaz just wants to do the right thing.

Let Brother Johnson die in the cold space? Or try to set him free—and then see what happens next?

In an icebound palace of magic and menace, a young woman plots to outwit a cruel king in a bracing fantasy about love, found family, and immeasurable revenge.

Brynja spent her childhood as a captive performer in Tenebris, the imposing mountain palace of King Kallias. Every night she risked death for the king’s entertainment until his rebellious son, Prince Ballast, helped her escape. Now twenty, Brynja has never forgotten the brutal king. Or forgiven him. Under the cloak of a three-month-long Winter Dark, Brynja is returning to Tenebris for revenge.

Accompanied by a rival court, including the alluring Prince Vil, Brynja poses as diplomatic royalty to barter peace between nations. No one is better equipped to infiltrate the palace than Brynja—she remembers every hidden passage like a bad dream. But her quest to destroy Kallias is complicated by her feelings for Prince Ballast, whom she isn’t sure she can still trust. And Kallias’s own quest to mine a catastrophic weapon of war buried in the mountain’s heart will threaten them all, and force Brynja to face the darkest parts of herself.

The lives of everyone she loves depend on the choices she must make. So, too, does the fate of the world.

From Rose Tremain, the bestselling, Orange Prize winning author of The Road Home, comes a deeply moving coming-of-age story.

Two paths. Two futures. But only one way home.

In the sun-bleached idyll of his Greek island home, seventeen-year-old Petros Castellanos’s future seems mapped out: he’ll inherit his father’s modest taxi fleet and continue his family tradition. However, his English mother sees a different path for her son, one that leads far from the watchful eyes of their small community.

So Petros goes to London to stay with his mother’s cousin. The capital is an overwhelming city whose dazzling possibilities both terrify and enthral him. But he must decide: will he disappoint his father to fulfil his mother’s dreams, or find the courage to chart his own course home?

The Toy Car is a deeply moving coming-of-age story about the weight of expectation and what it means to decide the shape of your own life.

In a haunting novel of psychological suspense, a summer getaway gone wrong rips apart a group of lifelong friends, thrusting their story into the true crime spotlight—and potentially their secrets, too.

For five friends vacationing on Block Island, it was a summer to remember. How could they forget it when only four made it back to the mainland?

Now, half a decade after Zoe Gilbert’s unsolved disappearance, Callie Sutter invites estranged friends Meg, Tess, and Lindsey—the last to see Zoe on that fateful trip—to reunite on the anniversary of the mystery that tore them apart. Back on Block Island, Callie reasons, they can come together again, memorialize Zoe, allay old resentments and recriminations, and put the past to rest. But it won’t be so easy. Patricia Adele, a true crime podcaster who once made a name for herself by casting suspicion on Zoe’s surviving friends all those years ago, is most eager for the reunion. She’s resurfaced with a book proposal claiming to expose them all as cold-blooded liars and conspirators in a crime once and for all.

Driven by self-preservation, the women must reckon with their long-held secrets and shared history if they’re to find out what really happened to Zoe on that hot August day. But will the truth set them free or condemn them all? No one is prepared to find out.

The bluff of a lifetime…

It started off innocently enough. Mo just wanted to catch a girl’s eye. She was this super-talented and mysterious skater girl who looked like she had the universe all figured out. So Mo did what any self-respecting nerd would do: He put aside his chess pieces, his guinea pig, and his books on astronomy and transformed himself into a skater guy, in the hopes that she might notice him.

He never expected to catch the attention of his entire town, practically all of Sweden, and the internet. But that’s exactly what happens when Mo—by a stroke of total luck—pulls off the skateboarding trick of a lifetime: He goes viral.

What’s a guy to do when the whole universe is expecting him to be something he’s not? Find out in this charming and hilarious story as Mo learns the meaning of being true to yourself…the hard way.