What a fabulous collection of thrillers and mysteries! Thank you Minotaur for the opportunity to read this set of excerpts from five great new books in advance. I look forward to reading the full books asap!

What better way to discover new books you might not look at other than through tasty bits of samplers. Introduces you to those authors you may not have heard of but by reading these short glimples of the books you will find something to be on your TBR list! Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

The Minotaur Sampler Volume 2

Oh how I enjoyed these fantastic sampler of an amazingly curated books releasing this spring/summer. I absolutely loved them and was so intrigued by each one of the stories which I am now picking up that caught my attention and completely hooked me into the story.

These samplers are such an amazing idea to just be able to get a glimpse of the story and as such with the first few chapters, you get a feel of the book and will know whether this is something you would enjoy to read completely. it just wets the appetite but in this case, I was begging for more.

Just a great curated sample of amazing upcoming releases. This was simply fantastic. I loved them all.

If you are looking to add to your potential pre-order want-need-must-have list of books to make your heart race—that is coming out soon, and you are undecided—then I Highly Recommend downloading the eBook(s), [insert echoey announcer voice here] THE MINOTAUR SAMPLER, Volume 2!

Bonus Kids, THE MINOTAUR SAMPLE catalog in the eBook format containing potential books to purchase is Free for the Barnes & Noble Nook, Amazon Kindle (I use the app. or my Kindle) Kobo, Google Play, iBooks, and eBooks dot com.

No, I’m not talking about Kindle Unlimited ‘Free,’ I mean FREEEEEEEE to download now!

What you will find in each volume are enticing excerpts from each featured book followed by the date of release and a conveniently placed purchase link.

After reading the excerpts from each of the five books in Volume 2, those that tickle my fancy are:

ALL OF THEM!!

Mary Dixie Carter’s THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Ragnar Jónasson’s THE GIRL WHO DIED
Joanna Schaffhausen’s GONE FOR GOOD
Ashley Weaver’s A PECULIAR COMBINATION
Brian Klingborg’s THIEF OF SOULS

I’m not going to spoil the contents of each, a discovery that is yours alone to make, Dear Reader. Have fun, happy reading, and don’t forget to pre-order.

Okay, I lied—here's a snippet from GONE FOR GOOD only because it made me laugh out loud:

‘DO YOU REMEMBER THE MOMENT YOU REALIZED YOU WERE GOING TO DIE? I was five years old, lying in my princess bed with its canopy and pink dust ruffles. My mother had sent me there after I put her expensive brassiere on Louie, our beagle. I might’ve gotten away with it, but I also used the Polaroid camera to take a picture of him and showed it to our mailman.’

I love the opening lines above, as the reader is first introduced to Grace Harper by the way this lighthearted journal entry segues into her contemplation about death—the focus then turns to cases that involve THE LOVELORN KILLER in subsequent entries. You see, Grace is a member of The Grave Diggers—a group of amateur sleuths who take on dead cases, ‘gone cold so long that most others have forgotten about them or given up.’

Thank you, NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press, for loaning me an eGalley of THE MINOTAUR SAMPLER, VOLUME 2, in the request for an honest review.

This is a great selection of books that provides a few chapters for you to read. They all definitely piqued my interest and was disappointed when each sample ended. I have not read any of these author's previous books and I am looking forward to reading more from them. Each sneak peek had my attention and kept me invested in the story. Looking forward to reading each one of these books!

Thank you Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for the opportunity to read this sampler book.

Thanks to Minotaur and NetGalley for the chance to read samples of upcoming mysteries and thrillers!

The first Minotaur sampler helped me find two of my favorite reads this year, FINLAY DONOVAN IS KILLING IT and EVERY LAST FEAR, so now I will always pick up the latest Minotaur sampler in the hopes of finding my next great read. I enjoy a good mystery but I'm quite picky and also not very familiar with the genre (no idea who any of these authors are and whether they're debut or not) so samplers are a great opportunity for me.

This time around, I didn't find anything that's a surefire hit for me, but like I said I am quite picky!

THE PHOTOGRAPHER by Mary Dixie Carter - I got a good laugh out of the protagonist's name, Delta Dawn (earworm for the day!) ,but psychological thrillers aren't really my thing. I enjoyed Delta's confidence and competence at first, talking about how she looks for weaknesses to balance out with lighting, and she looks to cultivate moments to tell a story, but soon got tired with how self-obsessed she was (at one point thinks about how she's got a larger chest than this rich client, okay good for your weirdo, also the sentence "I rarely are dessert, because I wanted to maintain my figure" made me want to stab something) and what a creep she is -- she does a favor for her clients but then snoops around their house looking for incredibly personal information just because she can, and then she goes home and photoshops the pictures to look good but also makes copies inserting herself into kissing the husband or hugging the wife and then PRINTS THEM AND HANGS THEM ON HERW WALL. So one chapter in I was like "wow I don't like you" and by the end of chapter three I was like "wow I don't want to spend any more pages in your head byeeee." Again--I understand the messed-up, unreliable, unlikeable protagonist is a staple of psychological thrillers, and that for others this is a delicious crazy train ride to go on, but it's just totally not my thing.

Speaking of totally not my thing, THE GIRL WHO DIED by Ragnar Jonassan is set in Iceland and is about a woman taking a job in literal nowhere, in an isolated town of 10 people, teaching two little girls, and everything is creepy and foreboding. Also, there is a LOT of exposition about all these 10 people that I skipped over, because I would have turned around and gone back to my miserable city life as soon as I saw that creepy little girl staring at me through the window.

GONE FOR GOOD by Joanna Schaffhausen was more up my alley, and I think I will read the whole thing. It reminded me of TV shows -- the serial killer from the detective's past reminded me of CASTLE, and the true crime amateur sleuths reminded me of the Hulu season of VERONICA MARS. That's not a bad thing though! I like genre fiction precisely because it hits familiar beats. And I love this conceit of having the murdered amateur sleuth's notes interwoven throughout the narrative -- having the prologue cut off in the middle of the sentence was EXCELLENT and put me on the edge of my seat.

A PECULIAR COMBINATION by Ashley Weaver is the only historical mystery in this set. Ellie McDonnell's family empties rich people's safes to get by as WWII rages, but one night she gets caught and asked to do a job for the military. I was intrigued by the synopsis but found myself bored by the slow pace of the excerpt--the synopsis goes way past what we get here! Additionally, I do enjoy historical mysteries but something about the WWII setting just made me so bored, I feel like this is a setting that is really saturated in all kinds of media, both literature and TV/movies.

THIEF OF SOULS by Brian Klingborg is set in present-day small-town China. (I think present day? There are cell phones.) I found this excerpt to be slow-paced as well, and the use of third-person present tense was jarring. One notable thing was how much cultural context was given, it was clearly written for a Western audience with lots of asides such as how Wang is the "second-most common surname in China," or how guns are so rare in China that even our protagonist Inspector Lu does not carry one. I lean toward appreciating the hand-holding and learning about a culture I'm not familiar with, but I know in the romance genre there is fierce debate about the issue (i.e., not writing for a "default" audience of white Westerners).

These books span a range of subgenres/tones (psychological to procedural) and locations (US [NYC and Chicago], Europe [Iceland and UK], China). While I am only planning to read one of the five, I know I'm picky about the kind of mystery I'm looking for. I think this sampler does a good job of its goal to provide readers with a variety of upcoming books to get excited about.

The Minotaur Sampler, Vol.2, is a great introduction to upcoming books! All five have caught my interest and promise to be worth reading when they are published this spring and summer.

The Photographer, by Mary Dixie Carter: The excerpt indicates this to be a suspenseful, modern murder/thriller in a suburban setting.

The Girl Who Died, by Ragnar Jonasson: I’ve never read a mystery set in Iceland, so that immediately drew my attention. The excerpt points to a creepy, middle of nowhere, chiller/mystery in a “cool” locale.

Gone for Good, by Joanna Schaffhausen: This is an author I follow, and her upcoming novel promises to be a taut, serial killer crime story set in Chicago.

A Peculiar Combination, by Ashley Weaver: The setting is England during WWII and features a family of British burglars, as well as spies and double agents.

Thief of Souls, by Brian Klingborg: The setting for this mystery is northern China, Beijing and some rural locales, and features a Chinese police inspector, Lu Fei. The writing is witty, the humor wry, and the setting a nice change, so I look forward to reading it.

Thank you to Minotaur/St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the ARC. These are my honest opinions.

Five short books. Five authors. This unique offering is a compilation of longer short stories which gives readers a good way to try out (possibly unknown to you) multiple authors without investing so much time. I especially appreciated this format as I'm always on the lookout for new-to-me authors in the mystery genre but don't always want to commit to 250-350 pages. Some stories I liked; a couple didn't fit my current reading mood but I'll likely go back to them later. Nice concept!

Great preview reading. I did in fact preorder the books and I’m sure will be able to enjoy cover to cover. I love a well written mystery or psychological thriller and this meets to mark for sure.

Picking my next read was easy.

I will be reviewing this separately as they come out and I will come back here and update as they are read.

I highly recommend this book. I literally could not read fast enough. Everything this Genre should be and more!!
Thank you to Netgalley for allowing me the thrill of reading early.

I have found new books that I can't wait to read this year and I can't wait to get my hands on them.

I didn’t think I would, but I enjoyed this sample of five different thrillers. It’s a great way of getting a taste of new books without devoting a lot of time to something you might not end up liking.

Here are a few thoughts on each:

The Photographer -

-Delta Dawn - hokey name
-Delta was strangely obsessed, weirdly fixated on family she only just met.
-Babysitting just having done job? Really?
-Snooping around house, home office, desks etc.
-Manipulate photos hired to take to include herself?

The Girl Who Died

-don’t know what’s going on
-not enough here to decide if you want to read the book
-hire a teacher for two children
-go out the the end of Icelandic peninsula for a job

Gone for Good

-not unusual premise
-liked the exes for partners
-already have the book on my TBR list

A Peculiar Combination

-WWII setting
-Irish involvement
-locksmith skill set somewhat stereotypically portrayed

Thief of Souls

-interesting setting and culture
-balance beliefs with forensic science
-made assumptions about victim

Of the five, Gone for Good and A Peculiar Combination peaked my interest. Thank you Net Galley for the chance to read and offer my thoughts.

This is the first time I've received a Minotaur Sampler and it didn't disappoint. I enjoyed reading a sneak peek of the first few chapters or so of each of these 5 books. This helped introduce me more to the books and so I could decide whether they would be of interest to me or not.
I found that there was some element of interest with all of the books, but after reading all the way through, I knew which ones I was more intrigued by, and now I have a couple of books added to my tbr list. I'm excited and can't wait to read in particular, The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jonasson and Gone for Good by Joanna Schaffhausen. I also loved this sampler because it helps introduce me to new authors as well as keeping me up to date on favorite authors of mine already like Joanna Schaffhausen, which you should really read her if you haven't. If you like your suspense story with envy and obsession then check out The Photographer, or if you enjoy mysteries and thrillers in a secluded village, The Girl Who Died is for you and A Peculiar Combination is a type of charming historical mystery. Then the other two books are Gone for Good by Joanna Schaffhausen who is one of my favorite authors and writes great mysteries and this one introduces a fun, new detective character with this book being the beginning of a great new detective series. Last, but not least is Thief of Souls by Brian Klingborn, which I didn't read a lot of that sample because I couldn't get into it too much, but it would be great for those who enjoy murder mysteries in foreign countries.
Thanks so much to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press, and Minotaur Books for letting me read and enjoy this sampler. All opinions are my own.

Intriguing selection, I am excited to read the book by Ragnar Jónasson as it looks interesting for a first novel for me to try out by this author.

A great sampler that leaves me wanting more from all of the books- particularly the Photographer. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a chance to read these samples.

I always love getting this book. The samplers are just a tease with exciting paragraphs of stories I want to read. This one - The Photographer has me wanting to look through those eyes, as it looks like a thriller, one of obsession and desire. The others - Gone for Good about the past but deja vu and then The Girl Who Died are also peaking my interest!

I downloaded this to read Thief of Souls and I am hooked! I need to pick up a finished copy when they become available because the sample was just not enough. It has everything I could ask for.

I love this concept of introducing readers to novel that they may be interested in. It gives me a huge list to want to read

I love these samplers, please continue to provide them.

I cannot wait to read The Photographer. I devoured the sample and know that it will be high on my list of books I need to request.

The Girl who Died will also be high on my list. This read like a locked door thriller but very atmospheric. Loved it and will be requesting this as well.

The other 3 samples were written well, I just think they weren't the type of thriller I would enjoy.