Noir Fiction

When Dr. Emma Sweeney stumbles across the victim of a hit-and-run outside Galway University early one morning, she calls her boyfriend, Detective Cormac Reilly, bringing him first to the scene of a murder that would otherwise never have been assigned to him. The dead girl is carrying an ID that will put this crime at the center of a scandal—her card identifies her as Carline Darcy, heir apparent to Darcy Therapeutics, Ireland's most successful pharmaceutical company. Darcy Therapeutics has a finger in every pie....

Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books has published over 60 volumes in its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Featuring Noir Series stories from: Dennis Lehane, Don Winslow, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Susan Straight, Jonathan Safran Foer, Laura Lippman, Pete Hamill, Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Child, T. Jefferson Parker, Lawrence Block, Terrance Hayes, and more.

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam, and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

Ten years have passed since Joe Coughlin's enemies killed his wife and destroyed his empire, and much has changed. Prohibition is dead, the world is at war again, and Joe's son, Tomas, is growing up. Now the former crime kingpin works as a consigliore to the Bartolo crime family, traveling between Tampa and Cuba, his wife's homeland.

Red Harvest is a hardboiled classic that set the standard for gritty, no-nonsense crime fiction. Written by Dashiell Hammett, this explosive novel follows an unnamed detective—referred to only as “The Continental Op”—as he arrives in a corrupt industrial town known as “Poisonville.” Hired to clean up the city, he quickly finds himself in the middle of a brutal gang war. Betrayals, double-crosses, and brutal power plays spiral into chaos as the Op’s relentless quest for justice leads to a blood-soaked reckoning.

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.

Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns - it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer, a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire. Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat", and the heat's coming from all sides.

When McGee picks up the phone and hears a voice from the past, he can't help it. He has to meddle. Especially when he has the chance to reunite Sam Taggart, a reckless, restless man like himself, with the woman who's still waiting for him. But what begins as a simple matchmaking scheme soon becomes a bloody chase that takes McGee to Mexico, a beautiful country - and one from which he hopes to return alive.

Hanson joins the Green Berets fresh out of college. Carrying a volume of Yeats's poems in his uniform pocket, he has no idea of what he's about to face in Vietnam - from the enemy, from his fellow soldiers, or within himself. In vivid, nightmarish, and finely etched prose, Kent Anderson takes us through Hanson's two tours of duty and a bitter, ill-fated return to civilian life in-between, capturing the day-to-day process of war like no writer before or since.

A wealthy Pasadena widow with a mean streak, a missing daughter-in-law with a past, and a gold coin worth a small fortune - the elements don't quite add up until Marlowe discovers evidence of murder, rape, blackmail, and the worst kind of human exploitation.

Suzette knows her clever and manipulative seven-year-old daughter doesn’t love her. She can see the hatred and jealousy in her eyes. And as Hanna’s subtle acts of cruelty threaten to tear her and her husband apart, Suzette fears her very life may be in grave danger....

Fear. Anguish. Heartbreak. Selfless love. Ultimate sacrifice. All in less than a minute. Sometimes that’s all the time there is. Adam Manning arrives at the crime scene and quickly sees that not everything is as it seems. Neither is he. If you enjoy clean mystery romance and inspirational women’s fiction filled with love, hope, family, new and old friendships, and a mystery that twist and turns to keep you guessing, Stay With Me is the series collection for you. This is Book One of the eight-part Stay With Me mystery romance novella series. Book 1 of 8.

Vitus Adamson has a second chance at life now that he's no longer a zombie. But after killing his brother, Jamie, Vitus lands in prison on murder charges. Jamie's death exposes secret government projects so deep in the black they cannot be seen - without Vitus, that is. Sprung from jail, the government hires Vitus to clean up Jamie's messes, but tracking down his brother's homemade monsters gone rogue is easier said than done. The first of them is a convicted killer assumed to be safely behind bars.

Rick Barron, a former Beverly Hills cop, has risen to head of production of Centurion Pictures, and he's at the top of his game. But tensions are high in Hollywood, and when Rick's friend Sidney Brooks, a successful screenwriter, receives a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee, Rick isn't surprised. The witch hunt is spreading, and those under investigation are Rick's closest friends - even his wife, the glamorous starlet Glenna Gleason.

For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can't refuse.The 200-year-old godfather of the Budayeen's underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.

As Sheriff Clayton Burroughs tries to juggle fatherhood, his job, and his recovery from being shot in the confrontation that killed his two criminally inclined brothers last year, he’s doing all he can just to survive. Yet after years of carefully toeing the line between his life in law enforcement and his family, he finally has to make a choice. When a rival organization makes a first foray into Burroughs' territory, leaving a trail of bodies and a whiff of fear in its wake, Clayton is pulled back into the life he so desperately wants to leave behind.

New York, 2061: The place called the Pleasure Academy is a living nightmare where abducted girls are trapped, trained for a life of abject service while their souls are slowly but surely destroyed. Dorian, a thirteen-year-old runaway who’d been imprisoned there, might never have made it out if not for her fellow inmate Mina, who’d hatched the escape plan. Mina was the more daring of the two—but they’d been equally desperate.

Una wants nothing more than to teach, but she has been unable to secure steady employment in Reykjavík. Her savings are depleted, her love life is nonexistent, and she cannot face another winter staring at the four walls of her shabby apartment. Celebrating Christmas and ringing in 1986 in the remote fishing hamlet of Skálar seems like a small price to pay for a chance to earn some teaching credentials and get her life back on track.

Some say vampires came to America through New Orleans. Many believe they are still there. When French Quarter private investigator Wyatt Thomas is hired by the Greater Archdiocese of New Orleans to investigate a possible satanic ceremony that may have occurred at the Old Ursuline Convent, he soon learns that more is involved than Satan, The platform where the ceremony allegedly occurred is possibly a satanic altar placed in the convent by a secret society for the specific purpose of devil worship. The Order of the Blood, an offshoot of Freemasonry, has a centuries-old secret guarded by ...

TOUGHER THAN THE DEVIL BY A DAMN SIGHT His mother was a remnant of the Southern Creole Quadroon in the French Quarter. His father was heir to the Avondaire fortunes in northern Idaho. Can Randulet Thibodeaux split his time and loyalties between the sultry, strumming South, and the pious, pristine north? He discovers that he has been born under the same mysterious prophecy that richly blessed the lives of previous Avondaire generations, but he’s as improper in one place as the other. He was born in brackish water for a purpose! Balancing the peculiarities of the past, and the experiences ...