June is here, and along with it another crop of monthly Kindle deals , including quite a few fantastic titles with inexpensive Whispersync for Voice upgrades to the Audible editions. Here are the eight titles which most caught my eye:

Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) by Ben H. Winters, read by Peter Berkrot for Brilliance Audio, for $3.99 Kindle plus $3.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition — “There are just 77 days to go before a deadly asteroid collides with Earth, and Detective Hank Palace is out of a job. With the Concord police force operating under the auspices of the U.S. Justice Department, Hank’s days of solving crimes are over – until a woman from his past begs for help finding her missing husband.” Winner of the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award, both Countdown City and the first book in the series, The Last Policeman, are fantastic books and audiobooks. I’m eagerly awaiting the conclusion, World of Trouble, in July.

The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates, read by Grover Gardner for Harper Audio, for $2.99 Kindle plus $3.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition — “Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the 20th century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton; their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the verge of the altar is seduced and abducted by a dangerously compelling man – a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince who might just be the devil.”

Speaking of the devil… Next, two books by Joe Hill, starting with his most recent, NOS4A2, read by Kate Mulgrew for Harper Audio, for $1.99 plus $3.99. (Yes, that Kate Mulgrew.) “Victoria McQueen has an uncanny knack for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. When she rides her bicycle over the rickety old covered bridge in the woods near her house, she always emerges in the places she needs to be. Vic doesn’t tell anyone about her unusual ability, because she knows no one will believe her. She has trouble understanding it herself.” Dave loved this audiobook, and it made both his and The Guilded Earlobe‘s best of the year lists. And now thanks to this ridiculous deal, I can cross it off my “I should really pick that one up one of these days” list.

Horns: A Novel, read by Fred Berman for Harper Audio, for $1.99 Kindle plus $3.99, is Hill’s 2010 second novel after his 2007 debut Heart-Shaped Box, and the basis for the new/forthcoming feature film starring Daniel Radcliffe. “Ignatius Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke up the next morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache, and a pair of horns growing from his temples. At first Ig thought the horns were a hallucination, the product of a mind damaged by rage and grief. He had spent the last year in a lonely, private purgatory, following the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams, who was raped and murdered under inexplicable circumstances.”

Speaking of The Guilded Earlobe’s Best Audiobooks of 2013 picks, Marcus Sakey’s Brilliance is also on sale this month, for $2 Kindle plus $1.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition, read by Luke Daniels for Brilliance Audio. “In Wyoming, a little girl reads people’s darkest secrets. In New York, a man sensing patterns in the stock market racks up $300 billion. In Chicago, a woman can go invisible. They’re called “brilliants,” and since 1980, one percent of people have been born this way. Nick Cooper is among them; a federal agent, Cooper has gifts rendering him exceptional at hunting terrorists. His latest target may be the most dangerous man alive, a brilliant drenched in blood and intent on provoking civil war. But to catch him, Cooper will have to violate everything he believes in.” A sequel, A Better World, is due out in June.

Dave Donovan’s The Gift is on sale for $1.99 plus $1.99, read by Jeff Cummings for Brilliance Audio: “When an elite team of specialists receives a long-awaited first contact from an alien race, it’s nothing like what they’d imagined. The “gifts,” from a long-dead but seemingly benevolent alien race, have been sent to help humanity defend itself against an imminent threat. It’s clear that the gifts are intended to help, but at what price? Caught in the middle is Sam Steele, a high-level programmer and veteran with a tragic past, up against the arrogant, intransigent Colonel Eric Web, who considers Steele a loose cannon and is most concerned with giving the United States an edge in the upcoming battle.”

Seed by Ania Ahlborn, on sale for $0.99 plus $1.99, is read by Eric G. Dove for Brilliance Audio: “With nothing but the clothes on his back – and something horrific snapping at his heels – Jack Winter fled his rural Georgia home when he was just a boy. Watching the world he knew vanish in a trucker’s rearview mirror, he thought he was leaving an unspeakable nightmare behind forever. Now, years later, the bright new future he’s built suddenly turns pitch black, as something fiendishly familiar looms dead ahead. Surviving a violent car crash seems like a miracle for Jack’s family, but Jack knows there’s nothing divine about it.”

Lastly, though not a sf/fantasy book, I’ve heard fantastic things about Elmore Leonard’s Raylan: A Novel, book 3 of the “Raylan Givens” series which is the basis for the Timothy Olyphant television show Justified. On sale for $1.99 plus $3.99, the audiobook edition is read by Brian D’Arcy James for Harper Audio: “With the closing of the Harlan County, Kentucky coalmines, marijuana has become the biggest cash crop in the state. A hundred pounds of it can gross three-hundred thousand dollars, but that’s chump change compared to the quarter million a human body can get you – especially when it’s sold off piece-by-piece. So when Dickie and Coover Crowe, dope-dealing brothers known for sampling their own supply, decide to branch out into the body business, it’s up to U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens to stop them.”

UPDATE:

Here’s an additional big list of old/new titles, via SFSignal‘s as-always fantastic monthly roundup:

And a few more “evergreen” titles from memory, among so many of these deals: