Comedy Crime Fiction

Junior Bender is a Los Angeles burglar with a magic touch. Since he first started breaking into houses at age fourteen, he's never once been caught. But now, after twenty-two years building an exemplary career, Junior has been blackmailed by Trey Annunziato, one of the most powerful crime bosses in LA, into acting as a private investigator on the set of Trey's porn venture, which someone keeps sabotaging.

Butler Helen Thorpe is not one to judge, but the participants in Close Encounters for Global Healing are astonishingly unpleasant. The five-day program brings together people from across the political spectrum with the goal of helping them bridge their ideological and personal differences. No one seems interested in a civil conversation, much less global healing, and each person has shown up with their own secret agenda.

It's 1998. The Internet age is still in its infancy. Google has just been founded. Eighteen-year-old supermarket shelf-stacker Nigel Carmelite has decided that he's going to become a vigilante. There are a few problems: how is he going to even find crime to fight on the streets of Derbyshire? How will he create a superhero costume - and an arsenal of crime-fighting weaponry - on a shoestring budget?

What would you do if your ex got abducted? Remember, they're an ex for a reason. So let's assume you hate them from the depths of your soul. Line up the tequila shots, right? Not your problem? Now stay with me for a second. What if you were the only person who could save their life? Then would you save them? We are talking about another human being's life, after all. Now, imagine you have seven million dollars in your bank account. Sweet, right? It's seven million dollars or your ex's life. This is a judgment-free zone. Be honest. You'd keep the seven million dollars. Am I right? Yeah, me too.

Rhoda West is Silicon Valley’s favorite female CEO: the luminously charismatic founder of the fast-growing startup Radical, a wellness company whose core mission is the betterment of women’s lives. Rhoda’s Instagram page offers intimate glimpses of her personal life alongside promotions for the cult-status products developed in the Well, Radical’s secretive lab.

Berlin: a man wakes up in a trash can with no idea who he is. He's taken to hospital for treatment. Then people start trying to assassinate him. The man has to find out why, how to get them to stop, and what the CIA has to do with all this. There's also the little problem of working out who he used to be, and why that changed. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Piper and best friend Lance are trying to find him.

Best-selling author Jasper Fforde begins an effervescent new series. It's Easter in Reading - a bad time for eggs - and no one can remember the last sunny day. Humpty Dumpty, well-known nursery favourite, large egg, ex-convict and former millionaire philanthropist, is found shattered beneath a wall in a shabby area of town.

What, you ask, is a Fred Fitch? Well, for one thing, Fred Fitch is the man with the most extensive collection of fake receipts, phony bills of sale, and counterfeit sweepstakes tickets in the Western hemisphere, and possibly in the entire world. For another thing, Fred Fitch may be the only New York City resident in the twentieth century to buy a money machine.

Comic book artist Mike Mason arrives at San Diego Comic-Con seeking sanctuary with other fans and creators - and maybe to reunite with his ex - but when his rival is found murdered, he becomes the prime suspect. To clear his name, Mike will have to navigate every corner of the con, from zombie obstacle courses and cosplay flash mobs to intrusive fans and obsessive collectors, in the process unraveling a dark secret behind one of the industry's most legendary creators.

John Dortmunder doesn't like manual labor. So when he gets the offer of money to dig up a grave, he balks . . . then he wonders why Fitzroy Guilderpost, criminal mastermind, wants to pull a switcheroo of two 70-years-dead Indians.

Vasily Pugh, writer of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic series with a difference, 'Basically Frightened', comes this hit thriller laced with his trademark dry wit. “One of the reasons I read is because I can't sleep, having my Kindle by the side of the bed is great for those wide awake nights but this book had me awake all night, I just couldn't put it down!” Green Fingered Gardener “ At last, something different from the run-of-the-mill thriller.“ Author Ted Tayler “After reading Basically Frightened: Yet Another Slice of Post-Apocalyptia, and absolutely adoring it, I was really ...

When Chet the dog, "the most lovable narrator in all of crime fiction" (Boston Globe), and his partner, PI Bernie Little of the desert-based Little Detective Agency, arrive to a meeting with hydrologist Wendell Nero, they are in for a shocking sight - Wendell has come to a violent and mysterious end. What did the hydrologist want to see them about? Is his death a random robbery, or something more? Chet and Bernie, working for nothing more than an eight-pack of Slim Jims, are on the case.

In the third hilarious installment in internationally best-selling author Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg’s League of Pensioners series, Martha and the League’s latest escapade has them headed for the French Riviera in what is sure to be the most daring caper of the summer. Martha and her friends are sitting comfortably in Sweden… a little too comfortably. Determined to do more for their fellow pensioners - and jazz things up for themselves - they’re up to their usual antics: bank robberies, money laundering, and figuring out how to disappear in a garbage-truck-cum-getaway-car.

Desperate to complete the last chapter of his law thesis on workplace dynamics for women to secure his tenure, Professor Stanley Hopkins stumbles on an old close college friend, Donald Johansson, who has plenty of female employees. The problem is that Donald is a porn video king. Taking his wife to California’s seedy city of Burbank to help with taping interviews, Stanley realizes he is in way over his head the moment a leading porn star is brutally killed in Donald’s office during a party.

The cast and crew of a popular TV crime drama are shooting in the Lake District – but behind the scenes, relationships are as tense as on-screen. The director’s reputation proceeds him, the two lead stars are feuding and rumours swirl. Meanwhile the locals are enjoying the filming. But when on-screen slaughter gets swapped for real-life murder at the concert hall where the TV drama is based, and the genuine police are as baffled as the TV detectives, it falls to the locals to search for the truth.

Once a hotshot investigative reporter, Jack Tagger now bangs out obituaries for a South Florida daily, “plotting to resurrect my newspaper career by yoking my byline to some famous stiff.” Jimmy Stoma, the infamous front man of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies, dead in a fishy-smelling scuba “accident,” might be the stiff of Jack’s dreams - if only he can figure out what happened. Standing in the way are (among others) his ambitious young editor, who hasn’t yet fired anyone but plans to “break her cherry” on Jack....

No stranger to fear since meeting the unhuman Inspector Hobbes, Andy Caplet fears getting fired from his reporting job (again). His main concern, though, is a shady property developer who has designs on Sorenchester Common, and more annoyingly on his wife. Perhaps a trip to the mountains will help him relax, but this proves even more perilous with foul weather, inedible food, brigands, and a terrifying cruise. Fortunately, mountain leopards, Yetis and Flossy, the yak, take a shine to Andy.

Fred Van Lente's brilliant debut is both an homage to the Golden Age of Mystery and a thoroughly contemporary show-business satire. As the story opens, nine comedians of various acclaim are summoned to the island retreat of legendary Hollywood funnyman Dustin Walker. The group includes a former late-night TV host, a washed-up improv instructor, a ridiculously wealthy "blue collar" comic, and a past-her-prime Vegas icon.

WHEN WIZARDS WAR Deep in the woods lives a wizard called the Professor. In the depths of the Depression, the residents of Fester, Pennsylvania call on “powwowers” such as the Professor to heal ailments, tell fortunes . . . and exact revenge. When an upstart powwower threatens to horn in on the Professor’s business, he starts making plans for his own revenge. The sinister forces he sets in motion spiral out of control, and soon threaten to consume the leading citizens of the town.

Morris Duckworth can't get over Massimina, or Mimi, as he likes to refer to her. But then, he should have thought of that before he kidnapped and killed her. Only now, living in Verona and married to Mimi's sister, does he appreciate how much he misses her and how blindly he has stumbled into a trap of fate. Struggling to adjust to his good fortune, with a lavish house and cushy job, our unsavory hero finds that his new success is rife with tribulation: not least his pushy bride's staggering sexual appetite.