Comedy Crime Fiction

Rachael O'Brien's summer starts with a promising trip to England with her eccentric grandmother, her dad's long-time assistant, and her very good-looking, very gay friend, Travis. She thinks that distancing herself from the southern men she's developed an appetite for is the emotional breather she needs. But for Rachael O'Brien, nothing is ever simple. An amethyst oyster brooch with a scandalous past leads her into trouble far from home. Discovering that she has been followed across the Atlantic, surviving British culinary challenges becomes the least of Rachael's worries.

For one-woman crime wave Violet Winters, stealing is as natural as breathing. When she’s offered the heist of a lifetime, she barely hesitates before agreeing. Unfortunately, taking this job means returning to the city she once called home. And Kilchester is a city so rotten, it hasn’t just spoiled the whole barrel, it’s turned the contents to cider and sold it to schoolchildren. Which can mean only one thing - a smorgasbord of trouble.

When theatrical agent Daniel Bernstein sues the Evening Chronicle for libel, crime reporter Colin Crampton is called in to sort out the problem. But trouble escalates when Bernstein turns up murdered. Colin discovers that any of five comedians competing for the chance to appear on a top TV show could be behind the killing.

There's a brutal murder in the small Welsh village of Gilfach. The police are clueless. With no motive and no real suspect, the investigation soon grinds to a halt. Enter Mary Anne Smith, otherwise known as Granny Smith, the 71-years-young, pipe-smoking, heavy metal-loving, chaos-causing amateur sleuth with a difference.

Meet our narrator: witty, nosy, professional weaver of lies - aka ghostwriter for the rich and famous - and now, lander of The Dream Assignment (that is, a politician's tell-all memoir). Enter Dorothy Gibson: recently toppled Presidential Candidate, aka that woman, the most talked-about person in the country right now (for the wrong reasons).

Chris Benson looks up to his older brother. In fact, everyone looks up to Chris’ older brother. Most have no choice when they're lying on their stomachs in the middle of Barclays bank. But when Gavin Benson gets sent down for 15 years, the somewhat unprofessional trio of Chris, Sid and Vince are left without a ringleader. As if Chris hasn't got enough problems, his adulterous partner Debbie is spending money faster than he can steal it, his sexually frustrated sister-in-law needs a man about the house and the Neighbourhood Watch Scheme want to sign him up for a tour of duty.

Super thief Riley Wolfe can do it all. He is a master of disguise, can scale a wall, and can vanish into thin air (thick air, too). He uses these unique talents to rob the richest. But this time, it's the most powerful who have him in their grips. It's not just that the high-up, rogue government agent has abducted the only two people Riley loves: it's the fact that Riley has to do the man's dirty work to set them free.

When Gabriel Lee escapes an unhappy marriage and moves to Porlington to start over, he finds himself part of the Porlington Philharmonia - an orchestra made up of the usual characters you would find in such a thing. Until one of them is found dead following a concert. Suddenly, everybody is a suspect, but nobody seems likely. A thriller full of intrigue and humour, this tale gives an insight into just what a barmy world musicians live in, especially when things go fatally wrong.

A selection from the John Updike audio collection. These extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful.

Samantha Leiffer has a self-centered self-help guru for a mother, a cadre of off-kilter Greenwich Village pals, and an ambisexually-cheating ex-boyfriend. She doesn't need more grief. Then she spies two people dumping a dubious-looking ice chest into the Hudson River, and she has a chilling hunch about what's inside. Not being the kind of girl to let two psychos get away with murder, Sam sets out to unravel a mystery - and is soon being stalked by a sinister, shadowy figure who's wearing one-of-a-kind mirrored contact lenses.

When hordes of people descend on the picturesque village of Nasely for the annual celebration of its most famous resident, murder mystery writer Agnes Crabbe, events take a dark turn as the festival opens with a shocking death. Each year the residents are outnumbered by crowds dressed as Crabbe’s lady detective, Millicent Cutter. The weekend is never a mild-mannered affair as fan club rivalries bubble below the surface, but tensions reach new heights when a second Crabbe devotee is found murdered. Though the police are quick to arrive on the scene, the facts are tricky to ascertain as the witnesses, suspects and victim are all dressed as Miss Cutter.

Courting Death finds Melanie Wilkerson (from Cotton, book two of the Clarkeston Chronicles) and Arthur Hughes working uncomfortably together in the chambers of a famous federal judge. While Melanie neglects her duties as a law clerk to investigate the mysterious death of a young woman in the courthouse five years earlier, Arthur wades through the horrific habeas corpus appeals of two prisoners: an infamous serial killer and a pathetic child murderer.

Two crims. One schoolgirl. Someone's in trouble. Two dumb, wannabe criminals bite off more than they can chew when they abduct a schoolgirl from a particularly modern, angular suburban house. In the mould of Elmore Leonard or early Tarantino Blockhouse Blues and the Elmore Beast is a distinctly Australian story about kidnapping, obsession, and architecture.

After a dramatic change in character, a rather usual middle-aged man begins carrying out a series of rather unusual murders. Meanwhile Brad Shape, a crime beat reporter for the Manchester Daily News, is looking for the big scoop to revive his flagging career—and his crumbling marriage. But when he finds one of England's most notorious serial killers, it will be Brad's biggest break...in more ways than one.

After being reformed for five years in the Wyoming pen, the celebrated criminal Mugs Birdsong decides to found a crime academy that will instruct lawmen on the ways of means of lawlessness. He sets up shop in an abandoned orphanage in Rock Springs, and soon is instructing classes in bank robbery, train robbery, and various other sterling occupations. He sells autographed wanted posters, and persuades a banker to let him stage a mock robbery at the bank, for the benefit of his students - and that's when the fun begins.

A caper gone bad is the setting for this comic novel about three 20-somethings searching to find themselves in year one of The Revolution: 1960. The year marked the arrival of John F. Kennedy, The Pill, Women’s Lib, and the crazy concept of personal satisfaction. The world, and their lives, would never be the same. Follow Mickey, Tippy, and Nino from Manhattan’s garment district filled with low-end goods, loan sharks, and knock-off artists to the couturiers of Paris with the insane pressure to constantly create great art. A hilarious story of self-realization, love, and friendship.

Saffy Huntley-Oliver is beautiful, charming, rich, and in her spare time she's a serial killer. For the past fifteen years she's been hunting down and killing bad men: rapists, murderers, domestic abusers. As a hobby, it's not as Instagrammable as baking, but at least it's better for your thighs. The problem is, that it's hard to sustain a healthy, balanced heterosexual relationship when you're expecting to have to kill your boyfriend at any moment. She's lost her faith in mankind. That's why she's decided to look for a good man instead, preferably one who shares her interests.

The Edgar-nominated author of Gun Monkeys is back with a thrill-a-minute suspense novel that mixes crime and academia - with hilarious results. Here Victor Gischler draws us into a wild and wicked world, where tenured professors are busy burying bodies, cash-up-front P.I.’s hunt for missing coeds and one desperate street-tough has to decide which he’d rather be: a live poet or a dead criminal.

An FBI team arrives March 6, 2020, in a small Florida surfing village to investigate a series of terrorist attacks. The Bureau has a hot lead on a woman with a violent past and instructions to work with the local deputy, JP Barnett. Barnett's overly relaxed and incompetent techniques are instantly at odds with the federal agents. While the team awaits the terrorist specialty group from FBI headquarters, the local deputy seems to be doing his best to divert the investigation. The federal investigators are bewildered by the quirky locals and everyone's party-at-the-beach attitude.

Henry, a New Yorker left destitute by circumstance and obsession, is plucked from vagrancy by a shadowy outfit whose primary business is arranging for staged murders of anxiety-ridden clients unhinged by the “events downtown” and seeking to experience - and live through - their own carefully executed assassinations. When Henry joins this nefarious crew, which includes a beautiful blonde tattooist named Tulip, contortionist twins, and a woman referred to only as “the knockout”, he becomes inextricably linked to its ringleader, the mysterious herring connoisseur Mr. Kindt.