Crime Noir

When LAPD detective Michael Gideon and his police-dog partner, Sirius, are assigned to the Special Cases Unit (SCU), Gideon knows their work lives will be anything but ordinary. SCU gets the cases no one else wants, the unusual and bizarre crimes that need special handling and special investigators. When a high-school student is found crucified in a local park, Gideon and Sirius must face up to the gruesome tableau and the motivation behind the murder. Complicating matters is a nightmare from their past, the scars of a terrible fire that nearly cost them their lives.

While on special assignment to the bank fraud unit, Texas Ranger Faith McClellan accidentally stumbles upon a raging fire consuming the back of a nearby house. When partially cremated remains are pulled from the ruins, she finds herself back on homicide - and on the trail of a ruthless killer. As she races to identify the victims, the sadistic murderer strikes again - this time against state politicians with ties to Faith’s father, a former governor of Texas.

With three children under 10, Maddie is struggling. On the outside, she’s a happy young mother, running a charity as well as a household. But inside, she’s exhausted. She knows she’s lucky to have to have a support network around her. Not just her loving husband but her family and friends, too. But is Maddie putting her trust in the right people? Because when tragedy strikes, she is certain someone has hurt her child - and everyone is a suspect, including Maddie herself....

Bryson Wilde, investigator for hire, lives in an edgy world where the dames are dangerous, cigarettes dangle from ruby-red lips, and the nights are hotter than whiskey-soaked jazz. In R. J. Jagger’s riveting noir thriller, A Way with Murder, Wilde finds himself entangled in two deadly assignments, one for a young, raven-haired attorney on the run after visiting an archeological site in Mexico, and the other for a pretty, little doll-face, who is too mysterious to trust and too hypnotic to resist.

Michael Hudson spends the long days in prison devouring books given to him by the prison's librarian, a young woman named Anna who develops a soft spot for her best student. Anna keeps passing Michael books until one day he disappears, suddenly released after a private detective manipulated a witness in Michael's trial. Outside, Michael encounters a Washington, DC, that has changed a lot during his time locked up. But what hasn't changed is the hard choice between the temptation of crime and doing what's right.

John Shannon is on the run, facing life in prison or death by lethal injection. Then, a bizarre text message draws him to a meeting in the dark of night. A foreigner who calls himself the Identity Man offers Shannon an incredible chance to start again: a new face, a new home, a new beginning. Soon Shannon is living a life he never dreamed possible. In a ruined city that is trying to rebuild, he finds work as a carpenter and a wood carver. He falls in love. But then all hell breaks loose....

Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.

An alarming surge in whale deaths. Friends and enemies murdered. And a deadly game of musical chairs at the top of an immensely powerful and secretive cabal. Private investigator and haunted survivor LILA PIPER thought she’d slammed the door on her Chicago nightmare, hiding out on the Caribbean Island of St. Barts. After getting stranded there by the pandemic, she gladly accepts an offer to escape to a small bungalow in San Diego. But when news reaches her that friends and enemies from her old life have been killed, she starts digging to find out who’s responsible. If her instincts are ...

On Midsummer's Eve, three role-playing teens dressed in 18th-century garb are shot in a secluded Swedish meadow. When one of Inspector Kurt Wallander's most trusted colleagues, someone whose help he hoped to rely on to solve the crime, also turns up dead, Wallander knows the murders are related. But with his only clue a picture of a woman no one in Sweden seems to know, he can't begin to imagine how.

Hollis Bragg lives on the fringes. The hunchbacked son of a West Virginia hill preacher, he now resides in rural isolation next to the burned-out husk of his father's church, and earns his living ghostwriting songs for a popular band that left the poverty and corruption of Appalachia and never looked back. It's the life he prefers, free from the harsh glare of the spotlight and attachments that lead only to heartbreak.

The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op's most bizarre cases, and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.

In the field of country noir—the dark side of rural and small-town America—Lansdale staked his claim to East Texas with The Nightrunners. A '66 Chevy bears down on the countryside, with a carful of vicious teenagers and evil of Biblical proportions, in this terrifying morality tale of sex and violence.

Impossible doesn’t belong in Riley Wolfe’s vocabulary. He’s a master of heists and disguises, whose life's work is swindling the rich out of their undeserved treasures. Now rumors surrounding a dangerous new figure of international crime are spreading through the underworld. And this ruthless collector, the Cobra, has a personal vendetta against Riley . . .

It is the present day, and the world is as we know it: smartphones, social networking, and Happy Meals. Save for one thing: The Civil War never occurred. A gifted young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshal Service. He's got plenty of work. In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called "the Hard Four". On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn't right—with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.

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.

Pharmaceutical giant VirtuaPharm is attempting to create that world through their partnership with a fellow megacorporation who’s developing a closed neural network. The network, enhanced through the use of VirtuaPharm’s drugs, is worth trillions. They’ll do everything in their power to protect the product launch, including employing a private army of enforcement officers to stop any interference in their business.

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.

On the 20th anniversary of the publication of Barry Gifford's international best seller, Wild at Heart, as well as the anniversary of the Palme d'Or–winning film adaptation by director David Lynch, Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels presents all of the novels and novellas that comprise the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, "the Romeo and Juliet of the South".

Detective Sergeant Mark Ariti has taken a few days' holiday in Broken Bay at precisely the wrong time. The small fishing town on South Australia's Limestone Coast is now the scene of a terrible tragedy. Renowned cave-diver Mya Rennik has drowned while exploring a sinkhole on the land of wealthy farmer Frank Doyle. As the press descends, Mark's boss orders him to stay put and assist the police operation. But when they retrieve Mya's body, a whole new mystery is opened up, around the disappearance of a young local woman twenty years before.

Japanese literary sensation Fuminori Nakamura’s latest novel is as a dark look into human psyche - what turns someone into a killer? Can it be something as small as a suggestion?