Noir Mystery Thriller

Martin Michael Plunkett is a product of his times—as a child, he possessed a genius intellect, but also a pitiless soul and heart of blackest evil burnished in his adolescence. By the 1960s, Plunkett finds himself in the bay city of San Francisco, amid Charles Manson hysteria, where he indulges in savage and terrible impulses. He is revealed to himself as a pure and perfect murderer. Thus begins a decade of discovery and terror, the coming-of-age of a criminal, pieced together through police reports, media coverage, and confessions.

Of all the demons and monsters Samantha Moon has faced over the years, only one is unstoppable: time. Life feels as stable as it's likely to get for her, which should have been her first warning something was about to go wrong. An out-of-the-blue call from her sister brings bad news concerning her father's health. Ever since she went off to college, Sam has been somewhat estranged from her parents—no surprise since they never seemed to much even notice their kids' existence, leaving the eldest sister to fill the role of mother and father. Whatever notion she had to reestablish contact ...

They call him el Carnicero—the Butcher. He is the most powerful drug lord on the planet, and when the city of New York incurs his wrath, he utters a single word: “¡Venganza!” With military precision, he strafes Central Park with 4,000 pounds of cocaine, killing hundreds of innocent people enjoying a summer afternoon.

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.

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.

Everyone in the small town of Central City, Texas loves Lou Ford. A deputy sheriff, Lou's known to the small-time criminals, the real-estate entrepreneurs, and all of his coworkers - the low-lifes, the big-timers, and everyone in-between - as the nicest guy around. He may not be the brightest or the most interesting man in town, but nevertheless, he's the kind of officer you're happy to have keeping your streets safe. The sort of man you might even wish your daughter would end up with someday. But behind the platitudes and glad-handing lurks a monster the likes of which few have seen.

Hard-boiled detective Sam Spade is hired to locate a client's sister by tailing the sister's companion. Spade's partner Miles Archer takes on the assignment, and quickly both Archer and the man he was shadowing are murdered. As Spade pursues the mystery of his partner's death, he is drawn into a circle of colorful characters, and they are all after a legendary statuette of a falcon that had long ago been made for King Charles of Spain. Encrusted with jewels, it is worth a fortune.

When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain. From the author of The Maltese Falcon.

Grant McAllister, a professor of mathematics, once sat down and worked all the rules out – and wrote seven perfect detective stories to demonstrate. But that was 30 years ago. Now Grant lives in seclusion on a remote Mediterranean island, counting the rest of his days. Until Julia Hart, a brilliant, ambitious editor knocks on his door. Julia wishes to republish his book, and together they must revisit those old stories: An author hiding from his past and an editor keen to understand it.

Artemis Black's world is coming apart in the days leading up to Christmas. His relationship is on the rocks, he's struggling to make ends meet, he's gone days without sleep, and when he's called in to investigate a brutal murder at a big box store in Long Beach, he's at the end of his rope. Racing the clock to clear a young woman's name before she's charged with homicide, Black gets more than he bargained for, and finds himself enmeshed in a web of deceit and betrayal that will require every ounce of his and Roxie's sleuthing prowess if they're to survive the night.

Scandinavian crime writer and international literary phenomenon Arnaldur Indridason pens compulsively readable mysteries that have shot to the tops of best-seller lists around the world. When the U.S. Army attempts to secretly remove a plane from an Icelandic glacier, World War II intrigue erupts in the present - and threatens to engulf everyone in its path.

A successful entrepreneur in the mushroom industry, Jaakko Kaunismaa is a man in his prime. At just 37 years of age, he is shocked when his doctor tells him that he's dying. What is more, the cause is discovered to be prolonged exposure to toxins; in other words, someone has slowly but surely been poisoning him. Determined to find out who wants him dead, Jaakko embarks on a suspenseful roller-coaster journey full of unusual characters, bizarre situations and unexpected twists.

Caught in a snowstorm of drugs, passion, and hate, Spenser investigates a cocaine-related murder.

When wildlife photographer Ray Ingalls is murdered in the new owl-protection zone in rural White Rock, New Hampshire, Chief Sam Mason's number-one suspect is his archenemy Lucas Thorne. .... Until a mysterious stranger reveals that the victim was up to a lot more than just taking photographs of endangered owls. Suddenly it appears that a lot more people had motive to want Ray dead. Sam, Sergeant Jody Harris, and their K-9 Lucy now have a fresh batch of suspects, all of whom have secrets they don't want exposed. But when Sam's hopes of putting Thorne away for good dwindle, help comes in the form of an unlikely ally.

In The Cold Six Thousand, James Ellroy's most ambitious and explosive novel yet, he puts the whole of the 1960s under his blistering lens. The result is a work of fierce, epic fiction, a speedball through our most tumultuous time.

Jim Thompson's classic The Grifters is one of the best novels ever written about the art of the con, an ingeniously crafted story of deception and betrayal that was the basis for the critically acclaimed film by Stephen Frears and Martin Scorcese. To his friends, to his coworkers, and even to his mistress Moira, Roy Dillon is an honest hardworking salesman. He lives in a cheap hotel just within his pay bracket. He goes to work every day. He has hundreds of friends and associates who could attest to his good character.

Commissario Guido Brunetti comes to the aid of a young nursing sister who has had five patients unexpectedly die and decides to leave her convent. In the course of his inquiries, Brunetti encounters an unusual cast of characters but discovers nothing that seems criminal. Is the nun simply creating a smoke screen to justify abandoning her vocation? Or has she stumbled onto something very real and very sinister - something that places her own life in imminent danger?

Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt”, he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends.

DI Amy Winter faces her toughest case yet as a serial killer couple kidnap and hunt their prey. After capture, the victims are released from an unknown location each day. But freedom does not come easily, as the victim’s injuries become more severe, and if they haven’t escaped by day four, they won’t live to see the fifth.

Following the success of Paris Noir, the Akashic Noir Series has expanded to include the famously diverse and sometimes controversial suburbs of this legendary city.