Crime Noir

Brand-new stories by: Tom Abrahams, Robert Boswell, Sarah Cortez, Anton DiSclafani, Stephanie Jaye Evans, Wanjiku Wa Ngugi, Adrienne Perry, Pia Pico, Reyes Ramirez, Icess Fernandez Rojas, Sehba Sarwar, Leslie Contreras Schwartz, Larry Watts, and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton.

Everyone says the Elders family are nothing but cheats, thieves, and convicts - a fact 19-year-old Jamie Elders has been trying desperately to escape. She may have the natural talent of a poker savant, but her dreams of going pro and getting the hell out of the tiny town of Blind River, New York, are going nowhere fast - especially when she lands in a huge pile of debt to her uncle Loyal. At Loyal's beck and call until her debt is repaid, Jamie can't easily walk away - not with her younger brother Toby left at his mercy.

Home alone one morning, Sheldon witnesses a dispute between the woman who lives upstairs and an aggressive stranger. When events turn dire, Sheldon seizes and shields the neighbor’s young son from the violence, and they flee the scene. As Sheldon and the boy look for a safe haven in an alien world, past and present weave together, forcing them ever forward to a wrenching moment of truth.

Robert Finlay is looking forward to returning to uniform policing and a less stressful life. But fate has other plans. Finlay's traumatic past is about to return to haunt him. A policeman is killed by a bomb blast, and a second is gunned down; both were former army colleagues from Finlay's own SAS regiment. And so begins a game of cat and mouse, a wicked game in which Finlay is in embroiled in a fight against a determined and unidentified enemy.

Los Angeles, 1916: Photographer Bill Ogden has opened a portrait studio in the seedy noir world of early Hollywood, where he is joined by his granddaughter, Flavia—a woman in need of a fresh start after bludgeoning her abusive husband to death in Wichita. Though his business is mainly legit, Bill finds himself brushing up against the “blue movie” porn industry growing in the shadows of the motion picture mainstream. When a series of grisly murders take place across the city, Bill and his capable granddaughter are pulled into events as tricky and tangled as anything this side of The Big Sleep.

When entrepreneur Flosi arrives home for dinner one night, he discovers that his house has been ransacked, and his wife Gudrun missing. A letter on the kitchen table confirms that she has been kidnapped. If Flosi doesn't agree to pay an enormous ransom, Gudrun will be killed. Forbidden from contacting the police, he gets in touch with Áróra, who specialises in finding hidden assets, and she, alongside her detective friend Daniel, try to get to the bottom of the case without anyone catching on.

In the midst of one of the worst winters Chicago has seen in years, the body of missing teenager Ella Reynolds is discovered under the surface of a frozen lake. She’s been missing for three weeks...the lake froze over three months ago. Detective Sam Porter and his team are brought in to investigate, but it’s not long before another girl goes missing. The press believes the serial killer Anson Bishop has struck again, but Porter knows differently. The deaths are too different. There’s a new killer on the loose.

The perfect baby is only an appointment away… It’s the year 2053, when wealthy couples visit designer-baby companies to create the perfect child. Ex-cop Finnegan Cooper is hired to investigate the unexplained failure of one couple’s embryos at Melgen, the world’s premier designer-baby consultancy. When his client dies the next day in a suspicious car accident, Finn fears the client’s widow will be the next target. Determined to save her, Finn plunges into the shadowy world of genetic engineering, digging into an activist group opposed to genetic modification, an aggressive rival ...

1950s reporter May Beck never gives up. She uses her noggin, iron-willed moxy and her own set of rules to relentlessly collect clues that lead her to the culprit. And she'll do or say anything to get to the truth, no matter the cost. So when a mysterious clue from the past leads her one clue at a time to the trail of a criminal enterprise, she'll risk everything to catch the criminal and save an innocent victim. But will attempts on her life dissuade her? Will she crack the case before it's too late for the innocent woman? And who can she really trust? When Walls Talk is the second book in ...

In the rugged gorges of the Kimberley, where blackened spinifex and red earth tell stories to those who can read them, Special Investigator Odysseus "Odie" Kalaris is called to investigate a body staged to resemble an animal attack. A wildlife photographer's death in a remote country quickly reveals darker motives. What begins as a suspicious death evolves into something far more sinister, revealing connections between rare goanna breeding grounds, vandalised rock art sites, and powerful interests opposing a new sanctuary. When Odie discovers hidden SD cards documenting systematic wildlife ...

Alex Bledsoe’s fantasy novels have drawn rave reviews for their ingenious blend of classic fantasy and hard-boiled detective fiction. Now Bledsoe returns with an all-new tale of intrigue and murder.

BOOK ONE He was a ruthless yardie gang-boss, so why did he save the life of a policewoman? Liston Pearce is a gangster, a drug-dealing gang-boss. In a split-second decision he starts a series of life-changing events that he could not have foreseen even in his wildest imagination. This crime thriller is set in The St.Paul's area of The City of Bristol in 1989 a few years after the Bristol riots. With an exciting twisting plot Pearce battles, which path to take? Contains Strong Language. BOOK TWO It’s Bristol, the St. Paul’s area, August 1990. Liston Pearce, who used to be the crime boss,...

When a boy leaps to his death from a bridge in the northern town of Umeå, Sweden, police discover drugs scattered in the snow near his body. The town has seen a dramatic increase in narcotic use among its youth, but nobody knows where the pills are coming from.

If there’s one thing Hap Collins and Leonard Pine like, it’s trouble - and they especially like getting paid to find it. So when their friend and sometime boss Marvin Harmon asks the boys to look into a cold-case double homicide, they’re happy to oblige. It turns out that both victims were set to inherit some serious money, and one of them ran with an honest-to-goodness vampire cult. The more closely Hap and Leonard look over the crime-scene photos, the more trouble they see.

In a sleepy Devon village, a woman is taken from the streets. Local vet Jenny is horrified. This kind of thing doesn’t happen here. But it’s not the first time she’s been so close to a crime scene. The daughter of a prolific serial killer, she’s spent her whole life running from who she really is. And the crime is harrowingly similar to those her father committed all those years ago.

It has been three years since Detective Jonathan Stanton solved the most brutal murder in San Diego's history, and as a result found himself in the middle of the worst police corruption scandal in memory. Choosing a less high-profile position, Stanton is nevertheless reluctantly dragged into the violent world of The Sandman. The Sandman is clever, ruthless, and cautious. He leaves no evidence in his wake and takes a morbid interest in those that chase him. Believing Stanton to be his parallel, he finds an affinity for the detective. One that Stanton may not survive.

Xavier "Scarecrow" Wallace, a mixed-race MMA fighter on the wrong side of thirty, is facing the fight of his life. Xavier can no longer deny he is losing his battle with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), or pugilistic dementia. Through the fog of memory loss, migraines, and paranoia, Xavier does his best to stay in shape by training at the Philadelphia gym owned by his cousin-cum-manager, Shot, a retired champion boxer to whom Xavier owes an unpayable debt. With his memory in shreds and his life crumbling around him, can Xavier hold on to the focus he needs to survive?

When he kicked off, Florida mob boss Frank DiCilia left his gorgeous widow, Karen, everything, but with strings attached. She loses the millions, the cars, the palatial Gold Coast mansion if she ever gets involved with another man. And there's a crazy cowboy-wannabe thug named Roland who's acting as Frank's eyes beyond the grave, making sure Karen doesn't dally. But now Cal Maguire's come into the picture. A sexy, street-smart Detroit ex-con, Cal's got a line and a scam for every occasion.

DCI Harry Grimm is weary of humanity’s evil. Dragged to the middle of nowhere during the darkest of hours, he’s enraged by grisly evidence of a horrific illegal dog fight. And when the mutilated remains turn out to be a gamekeeper’s stolen pet, the gritty detective senses he has a solid lead after learning of a long-running feud. Immediately putting his team on the case, Grimm worries the stakes may be escalating when the animal’s owner is beaten and left for dead.

Easter weekend is approaching, and snow is gently falling in Siglufjörður, the northernmost town in Iceland. Ari Thór Arason is now a police inspector, but he’s separated from his girlfriend, who lives in Sweden with their three-year-old son. A family reunion is planned for the holiday, but a violent blizzard is threatening and there is an unsettling chill in the air. Three days before Easter, a 19-year-old local girl falls to her death from the balcony of a house on the main street. A perplexing entry in her diary suggests that this may not be an accident.