Noir Fiction

Tyrant magus Edrin Walker destroyed the monster sent by the Skallgrim, but not before it laid waste to Setharis, and infested their magical elite with mind-controlling parasites. Edrin's own Gift to seize the minds of others was cracked by the strain of battle, and he barely survives the interrogation of a captured magus. There's no time for recovery though: a Skallgrim army is marching on the mountain passes of the Clanhold. Edrin and a coterie of villains race to stop them, but the mountains are filled with gods, daemons, magic, and his hideous past.

Gus Murphy thought he had the world all figured out. A retired Suffolk County cop, he had everything a man could want: a great marriage, two kids, a nice house, and the rest of his life ahead of him. But when tragedy strikes, his life is thrown into complete disarray. In the course of a single deadly moment, his family is blown apart, and Gus is transformed from a man who believes he understands everything into a man who understands nothing.

Philippa Watson, a good-natured yet troubled 17-year-old, has just moved to Washington, DC. She’s lonely until she meets Judy Peabody, a brilliant and tempestuous classmate. The girls become unlikely friends and fashion themselves as intellectuals, drawing the notice of Christine Martins, their dazzling English teacher, who enthralls them with her passion for literature and her love of noirish detective fiction. When Philippa returns a novel Miss Martins has lent her, she interrupts a man grappling with her in the shadows.

The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora Charles, New York's coolest crime-solving couple. Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick's client. Nick can no more resist the case than a morning cocktail or a good fight, and soon he and Nora are caught in a complicated web of confused identities.

When Mattie Winston catches her husband, Dr. David Winston, receiving some very special loving care from RN Karen Owenby, she quits her job and moves out. Mattie's best friend, Izzy, offers her a place to stay and suggests she'd be a natural as deputy coroner. Now, instead of taking patients' pulses, Mattie's weighing their hearts and livers. But Mattie's first homicide call turns out to be for none other than Nurse Karen, and even though she saw her ex in a heated argument with the newly deceased the night before, she refuses to believe David could be a killer.

Early one morning Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Police confronts a grisly sight when the body of a young man is fished out of a fetid canal. All the clues point to a violent mugging, but for Brunetti the motive of robbery seems altogether too convenient.

Debauched, divorced, and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days across the American Southwest, he travels from from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father - comedian is the only title Schafer has left. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when the opportunity doesn't come - or worse - it comes and goes?

A macabre grave is found at the foot of the Italian Dolomites. The body is found to be Roberto Lorenzoni's, only son and heir of one Venice's oldest, most aristocratic families. Commissario Guido Brunetti must move in the highest circles of power and corruption to unravel the mystery behind the young man's disappearance and murder.

Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art—a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure, deceptively simple, is based on the infamous Code Noir, a set of real historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multilayered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.

Year 2142: Earth is 30 years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective.

From the author of The Find series comes PAINTER, the first book in the gripping new nordic noir series, The Stockholm Killings. In the frozen heart of a Stockholm winter, a new terror stalks the night. Families are being slaughtered, their bodies arranged in grotesque parodies of classical art—horrific masterpieces staged for Inspector Stefan Eklund to find. Haunted by his own past traumas, Eklund is thrust into leading a new elite unit, partnered with the sharp, ambitious Delara Holm and the unsettlingly brilliant forensic psychologist, Dr. Torre Nylander. Their only lead is a man found...

It is 1969 and Glasgow is in the grip of the worst winter in decades, yet it is something else that has Glaswegians on edge: a serial killer whose name alone is enough to make them tremble with fear. The Quaker has killed another victim, snatching a young woman from a nightclub and dumping her body like trash in the back of a cold-water tenement. He leaves no clues, and the investigation has led police down one blind alley after another.

The year started badly and only got worse - blizzards, strikes, power cuts, and political unrest were the norm. For journalist Allie Burns, however, someone else's bad news was the unmistakable sound of opportunity knocking, and the year is ripe with possibilities. But Allie is a woman in a man's world. Desperate to get away from the "women's stories" the Glasgow desk keeps assigning her, she strikes up an alliance with wannabe investigative journalist Danny Sullivan. From the start, their stories create enemies.

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 ...

Sara Keane's husband, Damien, has uprooted them from England and moved them to his native Northern Ireland for a "fresh start" in the wake of her nervous breakdown. But three sleepless nights into their new life, Sara understands it's not an entirely fresh start after all: Damien's new boss is his ex-con father, whose contracting business is run with violence and tinged by paramilitary association. Sara, who knows no one in Northern Ireland, is jobless, carless, friendless - all but a prisoner in her own house.

A Flash of Noir is a collection of flash fiction and short, short stories, laid down old-school style by master mystery writer Christopher Pinto. Writing in the genre of gumshoe detectives and sultry dames, creepy horror and hep cat jive, Pinto has put together a series of mostly one-page, 60-second reads that will transport you to another time...a darker, more sinister time. From smokey bars in New York City to the tropical islands of the Florida keys, A Flash of Noir takes you for a spin through the seediest gin joints and darkest alleys. One minute you're speeding down I-95 in a hot rod,...

From the Author: Don’t read this if you can’t handle finishing a book in one sitting, horrific crime scenes, or questions that mess with your morals. BUT The Izard County Incubus is a rural mystery thriller packed with fast-paced action, brutally vivid crime scenes, and psychological mayhem dripping with vigilante justice. Beta Readers Say: “It’s not as weird as you think!” and “How do you come up with this stuff?” Synopsis: Detective Dakota Diaz and Hilrey Higgins are back to investigate a twisted crime wave in the Arkansas Ozarks. A family is butchered, and one girl survives...

Wes Cooper was dead. Then he wasn't-though he's not exactly alive, either. As an immortal not-ghost, he can transition between this world and the otherplane, which makes him the perfect thief for hire. For 70 years he's made a "living" returning items to their rightful owners, seeing his fair share of the bizarre in the process. But he's never witnessed murder. Until now.

Out in the far reaches of Los Angeles County, where the glamor of Hollywood fades into the long empty of the desert, two unlicensed private detectives are about to face a case that is larger and more complicated than any they’ve faced before. A ghost-hunting influencer disappears in the middle of a live stream. A beekeeper is murdered after telling his friends that he has come across a dangerous secret.

Since losing his knighthood, Crispin Guest has reinvented himself as an investigator for hire known as the Tracker. But his reputation will once again be put to the test with his latest case. Jacob of Provençal, a Jewish physician at the king's court, is missing a set of documents that he claims contain the power to bring forth a dangerous demon. Meanwhile, it seems a monster has already been unleashed on the city. Vulnerable street children are being abducted and murdered, their mutilated bodies the only clues left behind.