American Detective Fiction

A short story from the British Library Tales of the Weird collection Evil Roots. Best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, this short story by Conan Doyle preceded the famous detective by almost a decade. After an altercation, a disgruntled American storms off into the night, only to disappear mysteriously. Could a giant flytrap really be capable of engulfing an adult victim?

In this sexy, mysterious and romantic follow up to Beautiful Americans, snow falls over the French countryside as Alex, Olivia, and Zack search for their missing classmate, PJ. But while they have been looking for their beautiful troubled friend, they've been losing themselves along the way.

Natalie Spencer was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess. Like most women of futile lives, she lacked a sense of proportion, and the small and unimportant details of the service absorbed her. Such conversation as she threw at random, to right and left, was trivial and distracted. Yet, the dinner was an unimportant one. It had been given with an eye more to the menu than to the guest list, which was characteristic of Natalie's mental processes.

A devil haunts the City of Angels, and the most unlikely of detectives is on the case.1947: While Los Angeles is mesmerized by the sensational Black Dahlia murder, an Asian boy’s mutilated body is found in a back alley of Chinatown. With the thoroughly corrupt LAPD unwilling to devote their already strained resources to cracking the case, it seems this grisly crime is destined to remain unsolved. Tommy “Dapper” Luoo, a Chinese American college student, has dreams of becoming a private detective. Incensed and frustrated by the police’s lack of concern, he decides to help his ...

When the body of N’Gana Frimbo, the African conjure-man, is discovered in his consultation room, Perry Dart, one of Harlem’s 10 Black police detectives, is called in to investigate. Together with Dr Archer, a physician from across the street, Dart is determined to solve the baffling mystery, helped and hindered by Bubber Brown and Jinx Jenkins, local boys keen to clear themselves of suspicion of murder and undertake their own investigations.

An archeological team is excavating on the banks of the Betwa River near Jahnsi. A place where, legend has it, a couple forbidden to marry had run away to be together — forever cursing anyone who dares set foot on the island. When the head of the expedition defies the myth, the fallout is swift and deadly, the body found exactly as the ancient stories describe. Is the death a result of the ancient curse, or is it a down-to-earth case of murder?

As coal strike violence escalates, Matt Ansaro’s undercover identity is thrown into jeopardy. Having survived a coal mine cave-in, undercover Pinkerton detective Matt Ansaro is recovering from a broken leg. However, the union has called a coal strike, and Matt needs to walk a thin line to remain undercover and not let his employers know Matt is working in his hometown of Eckart Mines, Maryland. The 1922 national coal strike is even more violent in the Western Maryland coal fields as the non-union miners make an all-out effort to unionize. As strikebreakers are brought in to replace ...

A relentless gang war is the key to a shocking secretThe year is 1950. After graduating from college, Dapper Luoo stands at a crossroads. His parents want him to work in the family business, but he still dreams of becoming a private eye. Los Angeles is in turmoil. Mobster bosses Mickey Cohen and Jack Dragna are battling each other for control of the city’s underworld rackets, and Dapper is drawn into the fray when he’s given the unenviable task of finding a Chinese gang leader’s missing son. As Dapper gets closer to the truth, family secrets are laid bare, and he’s made privy to an ...

IT IS HER DESTINY TO DIE. CAN SHE CHANGE IT? A letter shatters her world. A sacrifice she isn’t willing to make. A man with an agenda of his own. Felicia Wingate has her life planned. She’s going to work with underprivileged children. Until she receives a letter on her twenty-first birthday that sends her careening into the dark belly of evil. Hunted by a fanatical cult leader, she finds herself on the run with her mother, a woman she just met. During their flight, Felicia discovers that friends are not what they seem, and that her birth father is hunting her to further his own evil ...

Waves of crime were washing the shores of Kenosha by Lake Michigan. Could the police solve the crimes before the next person got hurt? Teressa LeRoy, a young worker at Kenosha Public Library used to rescue street children on her own time. She went missing on the gala night from her workplace and Detective Nathan Adams was assigned the case to find her. One afternoon the gown that Teressa wore on the gala night was found hung on a bookshelf of the library. On another evening, some of the children saw a ghost in the library. One morning, a mangled body appeared in the Library Park and ...

Métis journalist Leo Desroches has just been released from jail. Fortunately for him, he is re-hired at the paper to write a popular column about crime. It’s summer; the city is hot and buzzing with mosquitoes, and it’s on track for a record number of homicides. Called to the scene of an apparent overdose of a young Native man in the inner city, Leo witnesses some rocks falling out of the body bag, and he picks them up. At first he believes they are crack cocaine but discovers that the rocks are really rough diamonds.

England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the boy's sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Drawn to Frant's beautiful, unhappy mother, Thomas becomes caught up in her family's twisted intrigues.

Murder is easy. Getting away with it is a whole different matter. Prominent Long Beach businessman Wilmer Judd is dead, gruesomely killed by his own employee, Sonny Cai. The case looks cut and dried, but Dapper Luoo isn’t convinced. From a brand new car that’s missing to the burnt-out remains of a corpse, too many things just don’t add up. Dapper thinks there’s some kind of cover-up, and heads out to find the truth. But in the gritty, complex streets of 1950s Los Angeles, one needs to look over their shoulder lest they end up dead too.

When Claire Fontaine learns that her ex-husband, Simon, is marrying again, to a woman with a teenage daughter, her blood runs cold. She is sure that years ago Simon molested her own daughter and was responsible for her mysterious death. She can't let him get away with it a second time. Vandalism, harassment; whatever it takes, Claire will expose him. Simon doesn't know where Claire got this delusion from; her daughter's death was ruled a suicide, but she has always blamed herself - is she just lashing out?