Crime Noir

A Brutal Murder. Broken Glass. A Hidden Ledger… and Deceit in all directions… ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "A fantastic read gripping from start to finish - unable to put it down!" When local artist Seamus Garth is found murdered in his seafront boathouse with paintings strewn around his body, DI Hogarth senses a sinister misdirection. Seamus was a man on the edge, a thorn in the authorities' side, but someone was watching his every move. Why did poor Seamus have to die like this? As Hogarth investigates the crime scene, he soon discovers signs of a dark conspiracy. What secrets did Seamus uncover ...

Renée Ballard is working the night beat again and returns to Hollywood Station in the early hours only to find a stranger rifling through old file cabinets. The intruder is retired detective Harry Bosch, working a cold case that has gotten under his skin. Ballard kicks him out but then checks into the case herself, and it brings a deep tug of empathy and anger. Bosch is investigating the death of 15-year-old Daisy Clayton, a runaway on the streets of Hollywood who was brutally murdered and her body left in a dumpster like so much trash. Now, Ballard joins forces with Bosch.

The third entry in the Noir Shots series of short noir stories is a deeply moving and emotionally powerful tale of big city despair. Two children growing up together are at the whims of a father who might be far more than just a mean drunkard. As they grow closer, forming a bond borne of circumstance and desperation, their lives spiral toward an act of violence that almost seems fated. Beginning at the end, and then revealing how it got there through the haunted memories of the young man, a heartbreaking story emerges. * This ceaselessly somber noir contains mature themes and sensitive ...

Sweden’s far north is growing colder; even in springtime, the town of Gasskas is buried under a relentless snow. As temperatures drop, tensions rise between a global corporation shamelessly exploiting the area's natural resources and wary locals who have scores to settle. A bomb blasts apart a crucial bridge. Soon after, a young journalist is found murdered. Meanwhile, Lisbeth is at home in Stockholm, looking to fill the void her last lover left behind. When she discovers that fellow hacker Plague has been kidnapped and taken up North, she has no choice but to return to Gasskas.

A troll in a pinstriped suit walks into a bar. He's looking for Alex Southerland, private investigator and summoner of elementals. A gorgeous dame is going to come to Southerland with a case, and the troll tells him that he is going to turn the case down - or else! But Southerland doesn't respond well to threats. Besides, he needs the dough! Framed for a murder he didn't commit, Southerland weaves his way from seedy neighborhoods to the dazzling lights of downtown - and from one savage beating to the next - to clear his name and uncover a shocking secret.

Inspector Hogarth is in deep trouble. The two men who once sought his blood now aim to eliminate each other. Only Hogarth stands between them. To stop them, he must plunge into deadly danger—and to protect his colleagues, he must do it alone. With the town teetering on the edge of a gang war, Hogarth faces a harrowing truth: he has become the catalyst for a new crimewave. He will fight on, alone. He will attempt to conceal the truth. But DS Palmer won’t stand idly by. Nor will the other woman in his life… The trouble is, their intervention might make things far, far worse… Against ...

Early one morning on the shore of the Thames, DCI Samuel Owusu is called to the scene of a gruesome discovery. When Owusu sends the evidence for examination, he learns the bones are connected to a cold case that left three people dead on the kitchen floor in a Chelsea mansion thirty years ago. Rachel Rimmer has also received a shock—her husband, Michael, has been found dead in the cellar of his house in France. All signs point to an intruder, and the French police need her to come urgently to answer questions about Michael and his past that she very much doesn’t want to answer.

In the shadows of America’s rusted heartlands, where old jukeboxes hum forgotten Prince ballads and gravel roads bury secrets six feet deep, a ghost walks again. Known as Christopher Tracy to some, Alabaster Finch to others, he was a legend in the underground, the kind of thief who never left fingerprints, only regrets. Now, after years behind bars, he’s out with nothing but a banjo string, a rusted key, and a promise he never meant to keep. The score? A mythical black diamond called the Eagle, long thought lost in a botched heist soaked in betrayal and blood. The players? A web of ...

Even a city that boasts three hundred days of sunshine a year has its sudden, often violent storms—and writers have long taken advantage of that metaphor. Renowned authors Katherine Anne Porter, Jack Kerouac, Stephen King, Rex Burns, Robert Greer, Michael Connelly, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine—among many others—have brilliantly portrayed this picturesque but often merciless city. Today, Denver is home to a thriving literary scene, with writers of all stripes finding inspiration in its people and streets. The authors and stories featured in Denver Noir are no exception....

Artemis Black's world is coming apart in the days leading up to Christmas. His relationship is on the rocks, he's struggling to make ends meet, he's gone days without sleep, and when he's called in to investigate a brutal murder at a big box store in Long Beach, he's at the end of his rope. Racing the clock to clear a young woman's name before she's charged with homicide, Black gets more than he bargained for, and finds himself enmeshed in a web of deceit and betrayal that will require every ounce of his and Roxie's sleuthing prowess if they're to survive the night.

He was a cop. She was his daughter. One of them wasn’t walking away. James Bradford wore the badge in St. Isidore for thirty-five years. He cleaned up alleyway brawls, chased down punks with knives, and never once had to pull the trigger. Until the night his daughter came home. Amanda Petrocelli had a record longer than Main Street, a husband with blood on his hands, and two kids caught in the crossfire. When she and her killer husband came knocking—guns drawn and hearts cold—James didn’t call for backup. He reached for his gun safe. In a town where loyalty is currency and regret ...

Hogarth is called to the scene of a suspicious death. A young woman’s body is found in the garden pond behind a project designed to get young lives back on track. But something went badly wrong the night Natalie Brigforth lost her life… because while the angel of Brookmyre House is gone forever, a killer still roams free. Natalie Brigforth was loved by all. She did the hard work of fixing broken lives while her rehab bosses took the glory – and an easy ride. Hogarth and his team learn that Natalie was liked by the residents – but not by all. One wanted her for his lover. Did ...

Iceland, 1956. Fourteen-year-old Lára decides to spend the summer working for a couple on the small island of Videy, just off the coast of Reykjavík. In early August, the girl disappears without a trace. Time passes, and the mystery becomes Iceland‘s most infamous unsolved case. What happened to the young girl? Is she still alive? Did she leave the island, or did something happen to her there? Thirty years later, as the city of Reykjavík celebrates its 200th anniversary, journalist Valur Robertsson begins his own investigation into Lára's case.

It’s 2008, and it’s been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organized crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about—for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy—himself.

I’ve always been a walking contradiction. After all, how many people do you know who are a violin maestro AND a mafia member? Trying to distance myself from my past mob life, I’ve accepted an artist-in-residence position at Thronewood University. Teaching privileged, barely-adult brats isn’t my idea of fulfilling, but at least it won’t end me back in the hospital or prison. Been there. Done that. But there’s something going on at this school that isn’t right. A chance meeting with one of my students, Victoria Waldorf, confirms it. She’s beautiful, but not vain. She’s ...

A thirty-four-year-old American woman—a secret agent—is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct.

Fuminori Nakamura's Akutagawa Prize-winner plunges us into the depths of a young man's winding, troubled psyche. An unnamed taxi driver in Tokyo has experienced a rupture in his everyday life. He cannot stop daydreaming of suicide, envisioning himself returning to the earth in what soon become terrifying blackout episodes. His live-in girlfriend, Sayuko, is in a similarly bad phase, surrendering to alcoholism to escape the memory of her miscarriage.

She married for money. She plotted for more. But the insurance policy had other ideas... Chantel Fletcher’s specialty is husbands. Her problem is cash. When her third husband turns out to be worth $2.5 million dead, she makes the leap from trophy wife to cold-blooded conspirator. With a mountain of debt and a dangerous past catching up to her, Chantel enlists her teenage daughter and a dim-witted ex-con to help pull the trigger on the perfect murder. But this is St. Isidore—a town that chews up second chances and spits out twisted endings. And when the cops come knocking, Chantel ...

A serial killer stalks women in rural Ohio. He is deranged but brilliant, known only by the grotesque nickname the media has given him - The Doll Parts Killer. The name is apt. He dismembers his victims and leaves them in garbage bags in public places. A residential neighborhood. Next to a roller rink. Behind a Burger King. The investigation is a disaster. No physical evidence. Unreliable witnesses. To make matters worse, the FBI has lost contact with the star profiler working the case.

While working one afternoon on the Northern Divide, a young tree-marker makes a grisly discovery: in a squatter's cabin near an old mill town, a family has been murdered. An army vet coming off a successful turn leading a task force that took down infamous biker criminals, Detective Frank Yakabuski arrives in Ragged Lake, a nearly abandoned village, to solve the family's murder. But no one is willing to talk. With a winter storm coming, Yakabuski sequesters the locals in a fishing lodge as he investigates the area with his two junior officers.