Did you know that Amazon has a list of the top-selling and free sci-fi and fantasy books? The list changes constantly — authors and publishers set their books to free temporarily to promote their work, and, of course, books move up and down in the rankings. Read on to find your fun free read for this weekend! And grab the books quickly because they don’t always stay free for long.
This week’s list is completely different from those of the previous weeks. So if you’re a fan of free books, there are going to be new things to read all the time. If you want to get this list in your inbox every Friday afternoon, subscribe to the MetaStellar weekly newsletter.
There are a lot of books to go through, so this week I’m being helped out by a couple of other members of our MetaStellar community. If you’d like to join me in doing these reviews — and taping our regular Free Friday videos — email me at maria@metastellar.com.
5. Death and the Shifter by Jason Venter
This is the first of seven books in the Chronicles of an Amateur Reaper urban fantasy series. The other books are $2.99 each, but are all in Kindle Unlimited. This is the author’s first time on our Free Friday list.
From Maria Korolov:
Urban fantasy is one of my favorite genres, especially if there’s not too much romance in it. I prefer the protagonist kill the annoying vampire, werewolf, or demon instead of falling in love with them. Enemies should know their place and stay enemies, that’s what I always say. (Yes, I’m in therapy.)
So I was happy to see that the description of the book had no mushy stuff in it.
Molly is on assignment to track and kill a werewolf. She’s a reaper and it’s her job. One benefit of the job is that she gets some extra lives. However, she’s already lost two of them, and still hasn’t killed a single monster.
Fortunately, she’s got another reaper, a retired one, training her. His name is Fuzzy and he’s a cat.
So when Molly is attacked by the werewolf Fuzzy is there to go and get help. Molly is still alive but just barely when she’s found by local villagers, healed by a cleric, and taken to the palace.
Wait, palace? Cleric? Villagers? Isn’t there a modern city on the book’s cover?
No wait, her room in the palace has a refrigerator. No, wait, the city she’s in doesn’t have electricity. Oh — she’s in a different dimension. The Realm. It operates differently from Earth.
So, the story is that Molly is a licensed private eye in Oregon. Or was. She died shortly after opening her own agency. Now, she’s still a private investigator, in Salem — the Oregon one, not the one in Massachusetts — while also working for Azrael, the angel of death, as a reaper. And she goes to the Realm for her reaper training, it looks like.
Anyway, she goes back to her office in Salem and a client walks in. A woman wants her to find a missing dog — and is willing to pay her standard rates. After collecting the retainer check, Molly stops by her parents’ house for a nice chat with her dad, then home to her apartment to do some laundry. Then Fuzzy finally talks her into doing some more training, and she creates a portal and goes back to Azrael’s palace in the Realm. She’s got some new magical skills she needs to practice so that she can hold her own against monsters.
Over the course of the next few chapters, Molly spends her time on her magic training and on looking for the dog. It is a very slow beginning. I’m twelve chapters — more than a third of the book — and still nothing much has happened. It’s a very cozy kind of book, where we learn about Molly’s relationships with her teachers and other mentors, watch her try to find the missing dog, watch her try to find the werewolf. I like the premise very much, and I like Molly, but the book moves a little too slowly for my taste and I probably won’t be sticking with it. But I can see why other people like it — the writing style is very readable.
Get the Kindle ebook free from Amazon here.
4. Dragon Tongue by Ava Richardson
This is the first of six books in the Rise of the Dragon Riders fantasy series. The other books are $4.99 each, but are all in Kindle Unlimited. This is the author’s first time on our Free Friday list.
From Maria Korolov:
We first meet Cora when she’s working in the forge with her feather. She’s 17, and getting a little antsy about the fact that all her dad lets her do is stock the forge and hand him tools. Also, her father is getting older. She thinks he should let her do more to help out, especially since he was recently sick and they were late with deliveries and got fined. Now they’re in a growing pool of debt. And her father has developed a very nasty cough.
The two of them live in a village in a remote location in the mountains and Cora doesn’t have any close friends there, even though she grew up there.
There’s also some tension in the village, with a cruel out-of-towner in a position of power over everyone. There are also dragons up in the mountains, and a young man dies when he falls of a cliff while trying to collect the valuable magical scales that the dragons shed. There are myths about dragon riders — people who had magical connections to the dragons — but nobody believes them any more. Except Cora. She believes the old stories.
There’s a secret cave she likes to go to that has carvings of dragons on the walls.
While walking home, she meets one of the other scale scavengers, and is invited to join their team. After the young man’s death, they’re one person short, and they have a quota to meet. And the work pays well. Cora agrees.
A week later, she gets word that all the scavengers have voted, and she’s in. They just want her to do a trial run. Cora lies to her father — she pretends that she’s sick and will stay in bed all day. Then when he leaves for the forge, she sneaks off into the mountains.
There, she joins the scavengers and gets to go into an empty dragon’s nest. That’s where they can find the most scales. But the dragon comes back and Cora is the slowest to get out of the nest because she panics. And her bags gets caught on something in the nest. The dragon roars at her, and it’s almost like Cora can hear it talking, telling her to get out. She cries out that she’s sorry, and the dragon suddenly stops growling at her, surprised.
She rejoins the other scavengers, wondering if she maybe she actually had a conversation with the dragon.
I’m guessing that she did.
Again, the book has a slow start but its very readable and Cora is very sympathetic. I don’t think I’ll be sticking with it, though I can see coming back if I’m in the mood for a story about a girl who gets to ride dragons.
Get the Kindle ebook free from Amazon here.
3. Star Mage Quest by J.J. Green
This is the first of nine books in the Star Mage Saga science fiction fantasy series. The other books are $2.99 to $4.99 each, and are not in Kindle Unlimited. The author has been on our Free Friday list before.
From Maria Korolov:
I’m on a roll today. Several books in a row in my favorite genres!
And, now — space opera. With magic!
Carina is a mercenary with a band called the Black Dogs. She’s in the middle of a firefight and things aren’t going well for her team. She can use her magic to help but, if she’s caught, she faces slavery and torture. She decides to take the risk anyway. All she needs is a sliver of wood, but the desk she hides under turns out to be fake wood. She keeps searching, and eventually finds a stamp made of real wood. She breaks it with the butt of her gun, extracts a thin splinter, and hopes that its natural wood and not a clever synthetic. As the battle continues around her — and people die — she adds the splinter to the rest of the ingredients she needs, swallows it, and casts the spell.
The spell gives her team time to escape before the rest of the enemy shows up. She’s worried that her spell would be noticed. Previously, she tried to keep her casts very small. Now the other mercenaries are talking about what happened to the enemy forces, how they just seemed to vanish.
This is sounding really familiar. I think I’ve read this book before. And I liked it. And I have a vague memory of having read the other books in the series. They’re not in my Kindle, so — maybe library books? Yes — that’s probably it. I just checked, and the entire series is on Overdrive. No, wait, my local library doesn’t have access to it, so I can’t download it.
I’m stumped!
But fortunately I have no memory of what happens next in this book, so I can read it again. Yay!
Get the Kindle ebook free from Amazon here.
2. Homestead on Broken Lines by Colton Lively and James Hunt
This is a a box set of three standalone book of small town post-apocalypse EMP survival, all part of the 97-book EMP Survival in a Powerless World series. No, that’s not a typo. There 97 books in this series. All of the books are in Kindle Unlimited and we’ve reviewed more than two dozen of them in our Free Fridays. These books are popular!
The three books in this box set are The Fallen Homestead by Colton Lively, The Final Stand by James Hunt, and Static, which is also by James Hunt.
From Alex Korolov:
There are three books here, so you should definitely snag up this free deal if you’re a fan of EMP fiction or apocalypse stories in general. I read a couple chapters of the first book in this set, The Fallen Homestead.
We meet Brianna sitting in the office of the restaurant that she co-owns with her older brother Kenny. We get a little backstory about Brianna and the restaurant in this chapter. Brianna used to be a sniper in the military, but she moved back home to Pennsylvania when her father died and left the family farm to her and Kenny, along with a bunch of money. So they share the farm and Brianna is the head chef at the restaurant and uses food grown on the farm to cook up some tasty dishes.
At the end of this first chapter, Brianna gives a speech to all her employees about how awesome they are and how a food critic had been at the restaurant that night and loved it. So everyone’s happy.
Not much happens in chapter two, but we do learn more about Brianna. It turns our her farm is too far from the restaurant, so she rents an apartment in the city where the restaurant is located. She stays in the apartment on the days that she cooks and then goes to the farm when she’s free for a few days. Also, Brianna has a service dog named Chester. He’s a good dog.
I didn’t have time to read much more, but I did scan the next few chapters to find out when the EMP action actually starts. I’ll tell you, this book has a slow roll. Nothing too dramatic really happens until chapter eight, so it’s a bit of a wait.
As far as the story goes, Brianna is a likeable and interesting enough character. If you’re willing to wait a while for the apocalyptic action to start, this book could be worth reading. Colton’s writing style is easy going, has a good flow, and will probably keep you hooked once the fun EMP stuff starts happening.
Get the Kindle ebook free from Amazon here.
1. Not Alone by Craig A. Falconer
This is a box set of the first three books in the ten-book Not Alone first contact series. The other books are $3.99 to $4.99 each, but are all in Kindle Unlimited. The first book has over 11,000 reviews on Amazon. This is the author’s first time on our Free Friday list.
From Maria Korolov:
We were a little short of volunteers today, so I’m reading this book, as well.
The book opens with Dan, on a bike, following his GPS to a delivery destination when an alarm goes of in a big government building and he crashes into a masked robber. The robber drops a bag of gold bars and file folders. The robber flashes a gun at Dan, picks up his stolen loot, and runs off. Dan hears a car door slam shut, but doesn’t see the getaway car. He’s about to call 911 when he sees that the robber missed a folder.
In the next chapter, we get to see inside the government building, where Richard is looking at his safe. It’s been broken into, then the robber smashed the office window to get away. The government building is the headquarters of the IDA — the Interspace Defense Agency — and Richard is its head.
Richard tells the investigating officers that the thief took gold bars, but doesn’t mention the documents.
Then we switch back to Dan’s point of view. He tucks the folder into his backpack and rides away. Then, once he’s far enough, he looks to see what it’s about. It turns out to be a plan for discrediting some UFO crackpot. Oh, Dan doesn’t think the guy is a crackpot — Dan himself also believes in UFOs. And there’s more stuff in the file. Evidence that the government was trying to block underwater excavations in Argentina and Lake Toplitz.
Paranoid that he’ll get caught with the documents, he goes to a public library and uses one of the computers there. Then he researches the two locations mentioned in the file. Finally, he’s about to give up and leave when he finds something else in the file. a folded scrap of card giving the location of a sunken alien artifact. He can’t wait to share this with the world.
Then we switch to Paris, where the president is at a public even with the French head of state when she gets word about the robbery.
Then, back to Dan. He creates a disposable email address and fake social media accounts, takes pictures of all the documents, adds the hashtags that people are already using to talk about the break-in at the government building, and posts everything.
Then he goes back to the bookstore where he works. He explains his lateness — and the fact that he didn’t make the delivery he was supposed to make — by blaming all the commotion around the government building.
Then we switch to Richard, who’s giving a press conference. He tells reporters that it’s all a hoax. Also — he knows who Dan is. He gives Dan’s name to the media, tells them about Dan’s past mental health issues, his previous writings about aliens, and basically throws the guy under the bus. Ouch. I wouldn’t want to be Dan right now.
So far, the books reads like a political conspiracy thriller with aliens in it. I like those. I’m not sure yet who the protagonist is going to be. Is it Dan, the bookstore clerk and delivery guy? Is it Richard, the head of the IDA? The president herself?
The book is very readable, and if you like political thrillers and alien spaceships — and Nazis, there Nazis in the mix, too — then I recommend you pick it up.
For me, I’m staying away from anything that smacks of political conspiracies. I want my escapist reading to be very, very escapist these days.
Get the Kindle ebook box set free from Amazon here.
See all the Free Friday posts here. Do you have other free books for us to check out? Comment below or email me at maria@metastellar.com.
Have you read any of these books? Are you planning to? Let us know in the comments!
Or watch Maria discuss all five books in the video below:
MetaStellar editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist, writing stories set in a future virtual world. And, during the day, she is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@metastellar.com. She is also the editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business, one of the top global sites covering virtual reality.
MetaStellar news editor Alex Korolov is also a freelance technology writer who covers AI, cybersecurity, and enterprise virtual reality. His stories have also been published at CIO magazine, Network World, Data Center Knowledge, and Hypergrid Business. Find him on Twitter at @KorolovAlex and on LinkedIn at Alex Korolov.