Crime Noir

A troubled war hero. A criminal mastermind. And the meeting of two fatal enemies....

January '42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese residents are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They're wrong. It's an early-warning signal of chaos. There's a murderous fire and a gold heist. There's Fifth Column treason on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, Commies, and race racketeers. It's populism ascendant. There's two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with history.

Following the success of Paris Noir, the Akashic Noir Series has expanded to include the famously diverse and sometimes controversial suburbs of this legendary city.

DI Alan Williams is faced with the most brutal murder scene he's witnessed: the ritual killing of an elderly widow. Evidence at the scene indicates that the murderer is close, and the investigation runs at breakneck speed in the hunt to stop them from striking again. Meanwhile, the busy port of Holyhead is being used by unscrupulous traffickers, who are embroiled in a violent turf war. With resources stretched, DI Williams is facing a case that could break him.

Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.

A MISSING BIOLOGIST. A CHILLING CONSPIRACY. A COP THAT WON’T BACK DOWN. When Lachlan Harvey, a leading mind in synthetic biology, is drugged in the heart of the city, he wakes in a secret facility in the harsh Australian outback. Kidnapped for his unique skill set, he learns quickly that escape is impossible. His only chance of survival is compliance. Detective Cameron Cole and his partner Rachael Blake are tasked with solving the sudden disappearance of Lachlan Harvey. The case throws them into a dark world of conspiracy, corruption, and cutting edge science. Just as the pair begins to ...

Freddy Otash was the man in the know and the man to know in '50s LA. He was a rogue cop, a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp - and, most notably, the head strong-arm goon for Confidential magazine. Confidential presaged the idiot internet - and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank.

The boy studied the bruise turning yellow at the base of his neck. With quick fingers his mother tightened his tie and pulled his collar high above it. Her eyes alone said, We will not speak of this.... Years later a man is found shot dead in a local park. On his phone is a draft text: I can’t keep this secret any longer. The recipient is unnamed. Detective Robyn Carter knows this secret is the key to the case, but his friends and family don’t offer any clues, and all her team have to go on is a size-ten footprint.

An atmospheric noir thriller from the shadows of 1930s London. In a city gripped by secrets, former war hero turned disillusioned private eye Nick Valentine is trying to drown his demons in whisky and shadows. But when a beautiful nightclub singer turns up dead with compromising photographs in her possession, Nick is dragged into a world of espionage, betrayal and murder. As Europe edges towards war, Nick races to uncover the truth behind a series of stolen military documents, navigating the murky underworld of Soho, the corruption of Whitehall, and the ghosts of his own violent past. ...

Explore the world of Maynard Wills, PhD, professor of folklore and fan of the podcast, Video Palace. The podcast followed a man named Mark Cambria, who along with his girlfriend Tamra Wulff, investigated the origins of a series of esoteric white video tapes. Cambria went missing in pursuit of these tapes, but not before hearing whispers of an ominous figure called the Eyeless Man.

He slowly eased back on the throttle and brought the boat to a stop on the desolate river. They zipped the large canvas bag shut and then hoisted the body over the side of the boat and watched as it slipped beneath the dark surface. Looking to the west, they could see fiery storm clouds were brewing - an eery sign of the fire storm of brutal killings and ruthless revenge to come. Detective Mac McRyan returns home to Minnesota to find the dead body of a retired police detective in the scraggly trees along the rough shores of an island in the Mississippi River.

In Manchester, two hardened gang members on the run take Catherine Blake and her one-year-old son hostage at gunpoint. She is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Held in a Transit van, Catherine needs a plan fast. But it means diving into her captors’ risk-drenched world, and playing them at their own game. Catherine has been through cancer, miscarriages and five draining years of IVF in order to have her son Ethan. He is the most precious thing in the world. She may be terrified out of her wits, but she’d do anything to protect him. Anything, no matter the cost. Brace yourself.

Six weeks. Just forty-two short days. That’s all it takes to rip the heart out of a city and change the lives of those who live there. Forever. One such life belongs to Ryan Jarrod. In the early hours of a wet winter’s morning on Tyneside, Ryan Jarrod approaches the end of his second shift as a Special Constable when he stumbles across the body of a savagely beaten Teddy McGuffie, a down-at-heel taxi driver. On the same night, an explosion rips through the heart of Newcastle upon Tyne’s student community. Casualties are high; the city brought to a standstill. And the University blast ...

Black rookie cop Trevor “Finn” Finnegan aspires to become a top-ranking officer in the Los Angeles Police Department and fix a broken department. A fast-track promotion to detective in the coveted Robbery-Homicide Division puts him closer to achieving his goal. Four years later, calls for police accountability rule the headlines. The city is teeming with protests for racial justice. When the body of a murdered black academy recruit is found in the Angeles National Forest, Finn is tasked to investigate.

From the introduction by David L. Ulin: "For me, Cape Cod is a repository of memory: forty summers in the same house will do that to you. But it is also a landscape of hidden tensions, which rise up when we least anticipate. In part, this has to do with social aspiration, which is one of the things that brought my family, like many others, to the Cape. In part, it has to do with social division, which has been a factor since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when then summer trade began."

Spenser's out to make war, not love, as he goes after Boston's entire X-rated industry. Pretty teenager April Kyle has disappeared into the city's darkest underworld, and to rescue her, Spencer pits muscle and wit against bullets and bullies.

The name's John Taylor. I'm a PI, though what I really do is find things that are lost. I work the Nightside, the city within the city of London, where the sun never rises and where the human and inhuman go to get their kicks, provided they're willing to pay the price in whatever currency the seller demands. In the wake of the war that almost brought the Nightside to total ruin, there's a power vacuum—and some think I should take charge. I don't agree. Neither does the immortal known as the Griffin. Still, when his granddaughter is kidnapped, he calls on me to find her.

When two men meet in the gym - the ex-boxer Billy Tully and the novice Ernie Munger - their brief sparring session sets into motion their hidden fates, initiating young Munger into the "company of men" and luring Tully back into training. Fat City tells of their anxieties and hopes, their loves and losses, and the stubborn determination of their manager, Ruben Luna, who knows that even the most promising kid is likely to fall prey to some weakness.

A serial killer returns after years of inactivity in this gripping new thriller. The green-paint-bathtub killer had Reacher running blind back in the day. The New York FBI team says Reacher was the serial killer then and is still the serial killer. But FBI agents Kim Otto and Carlos Gaspar believe a copycat may be on the loose....

DI Amy Winter faces her toughest case yet as a serial killer couple kidnap and hunt their prey. After capture, the victims are released from an unknown location each day. But freedom does not come easily, as the victim’s injuries become more severe, and if they haven’t escaped by day four, they won’t live to see the fifth.