Crime Suspense Anthology

One of the most highly acclaimed novelists in the crime genre, Lawrence Block is also a master of the short story. The sixteen stories (and one stage play!) collected here feature appearances by some of Block's most famous characters, including burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr and private detective Matt Scudder, as well as glimpses into the minds of a rogue's gallery of killers, sociopaths, and crooked cops.

Sixteen thrilling short stories (15 brand new) from an award-winning author of mystery and suspense.

The Mystery of the Blue Train: When the Count de Roscanvel's body is found on the railway tracks, police accuse France's top young novelist. The Haunted House: Artist Jean Lachesnaye lives an idyllic life with his family. But when a convivial dinner party gives way to a night of supernatural chaos, the dream unravels. The Aviator's Crime: Jacques Moret is the dashing man of the hour: a flying ace. But even as Moret celebrates, poison pen letters accuse him of lusting after the aircraft designer's wife.

Mark Sullivan, the co-author of James Patterson’s Private Games, has, in Robin Monarch, created a compelling new hero. Monarch is a world-class thief and a highly skilled operative - a man with skills, a rigid code of honor, powerful friends, and implacable enemies. In The Art of Rendition, Monarch is an agent for the CIA, called upon to use his unique skills to kidnap and interrogate a Russian nuclear scientist suspected of selling technology to the Iranians. But that’s only part of the challenge....

In stories like "A Night in the Cemetery," "Night of Horror," and "Murder," not only will Chekhov's dark humor and twisted crimes satisfy even the most hardboiled of mystery fans, but readers will again appreciate the penetrating, absurdist insight into the human condition that only Chekhov can bring. Whether it is the death of a young amateur playwright at the hands of an editor who hates bad writing, or a drunken civil servant who ends up trapped in a graveyard, these stories overflow with the unforgettable characters and unique sensibility that will forever make Chekhov one of the most fascinating figures in literature.

Ein Ehemann quält jahrelang seine junge Frau. Ein Internatsschüler wird fast zu Tode gefoltert. Ein Ehepaar verliert die Kontrolle über seine sexuellen Spiele. Ein Mann wird wegen Kindesmissbrauchs angeklagt. Leise, aber bestimmt stellt Ferdinand von Schirach die Frage nach der Schuld des Menschen.

The southwestern-most metropolis in the contiguous United States, resting a mere 40 feet above sea level, tends to garner positive national attention. San Diego is home to the world-famous San Diego Zoo, Balboa Park (with its history reaching back to the 1915-1916 Panama-California Exposition), temperate climes, and a sunny reputation. It is also the home of shooter Brenda Ann "I Don’t Like Mondays" Spencer, disgraced Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, and San Diego County medical examiner-turned-killer Kristin Rossum.

Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy listeners who are sick of the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a little bit of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal society. This stylistically diverse collection will make you squirm in your seat, stay up at night, laugh out loud, and inevitably wish for more.

"Providence was founded in 1636 by a rogue named Roger Williams. Williams escaped here when Massachusetts was ready to deport him back to England. In the almost 400 years since, we've become infamous for all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors, including serving as home base for the Patriarca crime family for decades. My very own Uncle Eddie - I can hear Mama Rose screaming at me: 'He wasn't a blood relative! He was related through marriage!' - was gunned down in the Silver Lake section of town in 1964."

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by “the seminal and venerated mystery pulp magazine” ( Booklist).

An unknown wounded man in a church. A fatal riding accident. A corpse and a tape measure. Whether in St Mary Mead or further afield, there is always much wickedness lurking below the surface, should, like Jane Marple, you have the eyes to see it. Published posthumously, this collection of tales, seven of them featuring Agatha Christie’s much loved Miss Marple, plus two stand-alone stories, is a treasure trove.

The best of the golden age crime writers, praised by all the top modern writers in the field including P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, Dorothy L. Sayers created the immortal Lord Peter Wimsey. This book of short stories is his ninth appearance and introduces another detective, Montague Egg. Poisoned port, pet cats in peril, purloined pearls... Lord Peter Wimsey solves the mysteries of the man who was blown into the fourth dimension and the murder in fancy dress.

Blood ties. The family we’ve been given, the friends we make, the loves we keep, and those we lost. The 26 stories in Family and Other Ailments teeter on the brink, hover at the periphery, or even the possibility, of crime. Under a soft light and at an angle, they're all love stories. The collection opens with “Spy Head”, a tale of friendship after a crushing trauma. In “Texas Two-Step”, brotherhood leads to a wicked double-cross. “Razorbills” shows a young woman seeking freedom from the prison-like caring of her sibling.

"Public Transportation" is a short story from the collection Phoenix Noir. Brand-new stories by: Diana Gabaldon, Lee Child, James Sallis, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jon Talton, Megan Abbott, Charles Kelly, Robert Anglen, Patrick Millikin, Laura Tohe, Kurt Reichenbaugh, Gary Phillips, David Corbett, Don Winslow, Dogo Barry Graham, and Stella Pope Duarte.Patrick Millikin is a bookseller at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale.

There is something of both the absolutely spectacular and positively disgraceful about Tehran. But most writers around the world are inclined to think that their own sprawling metropolis is the capital of every imaginable vice and crime, of impossible love and tenderness and cruelty and malice in measures that seldom exist anywhere else. For me, Tehran's case is no different - except that there really is a difference here. The city may be a hothouse of decadence, a den of inequity, all that. But it still exists under the watchful eye of a very unique entity, the Islamic Republic.

From a "master of suspense" ( Library Journal) and writer of "heart-whamming" fiction ( Publishers Weekly) comes an all new suspense collection by James Scott Bell. In the full-length novella One More Lie, high-flying divorce attorney Andrew Chamberlain is on top of the legal world. He buys his suits in Beverly Hills and wins his cases in court. But one day he's approached by a friend to handle the split with his wife. That's the day things start to go very wrong for Andrew Chamberlain...up to and including murder.

An original short story about Jack Reacher, available exclusively in digital format (ebook and audio), following the success of last year's "Second Son". Early in his military career, Jack Reacher is ordered undercover in Washington, to discover which one of four women, all staff officers on fast track careers, is leaking secrets. The suggested method: get close to each in turn. The obvious problem: the most receptive will be the guilty one, with an agenda of her own - to kill the investigation ... and the investigator.

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Now, West Africa enters the Noir Series arena, meticulously edited by one of Nigeria's best-known authors. The 13 stories that comprise this volume stretch the boundaries of "noir" fiction, but each one of them fully captures the essence of noir, the unsettled darkness that continues to lurk in the city's streets, alleys, and waterways.

A society matron's life is threatened after she engineers the theft of her own priceless jewelry to pay off a gambling debt. Only a debonair connoisseur of crime can save her and recover her gems. For a price.

Elizabeth Haynes' new psychological thriller is a brilliantly suspenseful and shocking story in which nothing is at it seems, but everything is at stake. Sarah Carpenter lives in an isolated farmhouse in North Yorkshire, and for the first time after the death of her husband some years ago and her children, Louis and Kitty, leaving for university, she's living alone. But she doesn't consider herself lonely. She has two dogs, a wide network of friends and the support of her best friend, Sophie.