Staff Picks, August: A Murder on Gibraltar and Three Other Free Reads
Posted by George Hartley
I read everything that comes through the Obooko review desk before it goes anywhere near the library. Most weeks that means a couple of keepers, a stack of maybes and at least one thing that is not a book in any sense I recognise (more on that in a minute). This week the pile did something it almost never does: four submissions went straight to the staff picks shelf.
All four are free to download in epub, PDF or Kindle formats, like everything else on Obooko. No card, no catch.
Death upon the Rock by Louie Dylan
The book that named this post. Death upon the Rock is a collection of crime short stories following Inspector Maguire, who is posted abroad to Gibraltar without anyone telling him why. The synopsis that came with the submission was a single sentence, which usually has me reaching for the polite decline. Here it reads like confidence.
Gibraltar is a gift of a setting for crime writing: a fortress town squeezed between a rock and the sea, one land border, nowhere to quietly disappear to. The short form suits it too. No room for padding, every story in and out before the trail goes cold.
Eurystheus of Tiryns by Barrie J. Wakeford
On the cover, a Greek myth. On the page, something far stranger: the story presented as a case file sealed for sixty years inside The Evidence Table Archive and only now released for public examination. The file concerns a routine retrieval job in southern France in 1964. The job goes fine. The journey home does not.
Missed trains, changed routes, the same unfamiliar faces turning up once too often, and the slow realisation that more than one group is hunting the same ordinary notebook. It is a complete standalone story, billed as the first released report from Department 14, and the archive framing does real work rather than sitting there as a gimmick. I hope Wakeford keeps unsealing files.
Dharma of Wealth by Oren Shabat Laurent
Most finance books ask how to get more. Laurent asks what the more is actually for, and builds his answer on the four Purusharthas, the classical Indian framework of purpose, prosperity, pleasure and peace. Money keeps a seat at the table, just not the head of it.
Twelve chapters, each closing with a practice and a maxim, all pointed at the treadmill of endless accumulation. The idea Laurent keeps circling is arrival, the possibility that a financial life can actually reach somewhere and rest. I see plenty of business submissions that are the same hustle book wearing a new cover. this one walks in the opposite direction.
The Order Matters by R.A.
The odd one out on this month's shelf, and the most immediately useful thing on it. The Order Matters is a 69-page plain-English guide to American military education benefits: the Post-9/11 GI Bill, Chapter 35, the Fry Scholarship, the Yellow Ribbon Program and state aid stacked on top.
The point is right there in the title: the order you claim these benefits in changes what your family ends up with. Sequenced properly, the same entitlements can fund more school, protect months for a master's degree and stretch a nine-month income stream into a twelve-month one. There is even a free companion app, College Tool, to keep the numbers current. If this is your world, or your kid's, an afternoon with this guide could be worth thousands of dollars.
What didn't make the shelf
In the interest of honest bookkeeping: the same review pile also served up a crane-hire brochure, an ad for an IPTV subscription and a step-by-step guide to registering a limited liability partnership in India, each submitted as a book. The form does ask for one. Interpretations vary. We bounce those on sight, which is exactly why the staff picks shelf stays worth browsing.
The four above have joined the rest of the collection, and you can browse all the staff picks whenever the pile at home runs low. And if you have written a book of your own (a real one, no cranes), you can publish it free on Obooko and put it in front of our 840,000-odd readers.
Happy reading. More next month, assuming the pile behaves.