Comedy Crime Fiction

"Tout le monde riait. Les Manoscrivi riaient. C'est l'image d'eux qui est restée. Jean-Lino, en chemise parme, avec ses nouvelles lunettes jaunes semi-rondes, debout derrière le canapé, empourpré par le champagne ou par l'excitation d'être en société, toutes dents exposées. Lydie, assise en dessous, jupe déployée de part et d'autre, visage penché vers la gauche et riant aux éclats. Riant sans doute du dernier rire de sa vie. Un rire que je scrute à l'infini."

Meet Steven Stelfox. London, 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power, and Britpop is at its zenith. A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine, searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification. But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.

As inventive as Agatha Christie, as hilarious as P. G. Wodehouse - discover the delightful detective stories of Edmund Crispin. Crime fiction at its quirkiest and best. Holy Disorders takes Oxford don and part-time detective Gervase Fen to the town of Tolnbridge, where he is happily bounding around with a butterfly net until the cathedral organist is murdered, giving Fen the chance to play sleuth.

Bobby Clark is just 16 when he drops out of school to follow his big brother, Jim, into the jewelry business. Bobby idolizes Jim and is in awe of Jim's girlfriend, Lisa, the best saleswoman at the Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange. What follows is the story of a young man's education in two of the oldest human passions, love and money

Mi chiamo Grace Bernard e, con ogni probabilità, il mio nome non vi dice proprio niente. Nessuno mi conosce perché languisco dietro le sbarre per l’unico crimine che non ho commesso. Eppure, se devo dire la verità nient’altro che la verità, ho ucciso diverse persone, alcune in modo brutale, altre con maggior delicatezza – vale la pena specificarlo, perché fa un’enorme differenza agli occhi giudicanti della gente. Quando ripenso a ciò che ho fatto, avverto persino una punta di tristezza, giusto una fitta trascurabile, al pensiero che nessuno verrà mai a conoscenza del mio strabiliante piano.

Paranoia-fuelled Zack Walker has trouble convincing his loved ones to obey his rules for keeping them out of harm's way. He's even uprooted his family and headed for the tranquillity of the suburbs. But then Zack stumbles upon a body, and a trail of deceit and murder leads right back to his own front door. Suddenly the 'burbs is not looking nearly so safe.... With a killer roaming around their neighbourhood and Zack's overactive imagination in overdrive, he's sure things can't get any worse.

Mumbai, murder and a baby elephant combine in a charming, joyful mystery for fans of Alexander McCall Smith and Harold Fry. On the day he retires, Inspector Ashwin Chopra inherits two unexpected mysteries. The first is the case of a drowned boy, whose suspicious death no one seems to want solved. And the second is a baby elephant.

Existential noir meets absurd comedy when a young man reluctantly enlists as source material for an art project. Stanley had known it was a mistake to accept his uncle Lech's offer to apartment-sit in Prague - he'd known it was one of Lech's proposals, a thinly veiled setup for some invasive, potentially dangerous performance art project. But whatever Lech had planned for Stanley, it would get him to Prague and maybe offer a chance to make things right with T after his failed attempt to propose.

When his third in command gets brutally murdered, mob boss Enzo Clowneone immediately suspects his arch-nemeses, the Juggler and Mime families. In order to stand a chance against their combined might, he must rally allied Carnival families to his cause - but who are his true allies? This book is a dark comedy set in an insulated world of crime. It touches upon the impotence of power, and the struggle for the Don to be both good and feared at the same time.

This thrilling, unpredictable, yet sometimes hilarious quest takes you from the fashionable London restaurant scene to the wild untamed jungles of the Cardamom Mountains, where an English baker and a Cambodian refugee search for a missing family and try to find a mythical plant, source of an incredible and unique spice.

For nine long days, the mayor and district attorney of Reno, Nevada, have been missing. Vanished without a trace. Their vehicles were found parked side-by-side at Reno-Tahoe International Airport. Did they fly somewhere together? They aren't on any flight manifest. Did the two of them take off with a big pile of the city's money? If so, the city accountants can't find it. Were they murdered? There's no sign of foul play.

Recently dumped and stuck with the mortgage, artist Esther Ray wants to burn the world, but instead, she reluctantly accepts a scrapbooking job from the deliriously wealthy Naomi Duncan. The scrapbooks, a secret birthday gift for Naomi's husband Bryce, trace the Duncan's twenty-five-year marriage. As Esther binges true-crime podcasts and works through the near-two hundred-boxes of Duncan detritus, she finds herself infatuated with the gilded family - until, mid-project, Naomi dies suspiciously.

A pretty but spiteful young actress with a talent for destroying men's lives is found dead in a college room just yards from the office of the unconventional Oxford don Gervase Fen. Anyone who knew the girl would gladly have shot her, but can Fen discover who did shoot her and why?

Veranix Calbert is the Thorn - the street vigilante who became a legend to the people of Maradaine, especially the gangs that run the neighborhood of Aventil. The Thorn continues to harass Willem Fenmere, the drug kingpin of the Dentonhill neighborhood. Veranix is still determined to stop Fenmere and the effitte drug trade, especially when he discovers that Fenmere is planning on using the Red Rabbits gang to bring the drug into Aventil. But it’s also Exam Week at the University of Maradaine, where Veranix is a magic student.

Charmante Dilettanten: Monsieur Lipaires Gauner-Truppe träumt vom großen Coup an der Côte d'Azur – doch irgendwas geht immer schief. Ein Rätsel, das zum Familienschatz einer südfranzösischen Adelsdynastie führt, versteckt im Kanallabyrinth der malerischen Küstenstadt Port Grimaud? Das klingt zu formidable, um wahr zu sein. Gelegenheitsgauner Guillaume Lipaire sieht endlich seine Chance, schnell an viel Geld zu kommen. Er versammelt ein ungewöhnliches Team um sich, das ihm dabei helfen soll, das Rätsel zu lösen.

Desde que David Valenzuela, un joven ingenuo y poco lumbrera, mató en defensa propia a uno de los hermanos Castro, conocidos narcotraficantes del Triángulo Dorado en la región de Sinaloa, su vida se convierte en una huida llena de oportunos golpes de suerte y en la que se cruzará con los más variopintos personajes que, sin él pretenderlo, le involucrarán en situaciones tanto trágicas como cómicas.

Midnight Rider Productions is a dark-web nightmare machine, headed by the one man who years ago drove Darby to hide in the seamy environs of Old Town and make his life there. But Darby left his own mark back in the day, and the shadowy head of production has a grudge to settle. Rider has found him at long last and plans to make an example of him.

Björn Diemel will reden: sowohl über die Einschulung seiner Tochter als auch über das Tantra-Seminar, das er aus Versehen mit seiner Ex-Frau besucht hat. Leider hat ein Unbekannter Björns Achtsamkeitstrainer, Joschka Breitner, krankenhausreif geprügelt – bei dem Versuch, dessen Tagebuch an sich zu bringen. Björn entwendet kurzerhand selbst die Aufzeichnungen seines Therapeuten und macht sich auf die Suche nach dem Täter.

It seemed straightforward enough. Sean had now consumed so much alcohol that everything seemed perfectly reasonable. He'd started planning the job already. The first problem was how to do it. Thirteen thousand pounds in an envelope seems a fair price for a man's life. Particularly if you don't know the man, he seems a nonentity and you quite fancy his wife. And there's no chance of being caught.

Grandma Mazur has decided to get married again - this time to a local gangster named Jimmy Rosolli. If Stephanie has her doubts about this marriage, she doesn't have to worry for long, because the groom drops dead of a heart attack 45 minutes after saying, 'I do.' A sad day for Grandma Mazur turns into something far more dangerous when Jimmy's former 'business partners' are convinced that his new widow is keeping the keys to a financial windfall all to herself.