Dark Humor Mystery

Welcome to another kind of terror as Peter Straub leads us into the outer reaches of the psyche. Here the master of the macabre is at his absolute best in seven exquisite tales of living, dying, and the terror that lies in between.

Mutée disciplinairement à New York, Colorado, un petit village raciste du fin fond de l'Amérique, sans couverture mobile et où il ne se passe jamais rien, la lieutenant de police de couleur noire, à forte corpulence, Agatha Crispies a trouvé un échappatoire à son désœuvrement dans l'animation d'un club de lecture au sein du commissariat. Mais alors qu'elle désespérait de pouvoir un jour enquêter à nouveau sur un meurtre autre que celui d'un écureuil, une série d'effroyables assassinats et disparitions viennent (enfin) troubler la tranquillité des lieux.

While on her daily walk with her dog in the nearby woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with stones. Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body. Shaky even on her best days, she is also alone and new to this area, having moved here from her long-time home after the death of her husband, and now deeply alarmed. Her brooding about the note grows quickly into a full-blown obsession as she explores multiple theories about who Magda was and how she met her fate.

An Urban Myth Come to Life and a Vinyl Record to Kill Over Before Mary, the witch/psychic detective, has time to clean out her attic she's tasked with another murder. The victim recently bought a rare item at a garage sale and someone decided to kill him for it. But the item is said to be an Urban Legend. So is it real, a knock-off or is the item cursed? The victim certainly feels like it's cursed and Mary might as well as she struggles to find the person willing to kill for an old vinyl record. Angle Man still haunts her dreams. Echo and Drucilla want to figure out how he drains her bank ...

Thea Campbell goes out for revenge when the one person who is simultaneously the most likely and least likely candidate for thief steals her horse. But Olympic hopeful Valerie Parsons is past caring about being arrested. She’s dead. At first Thea’s horse is assumed to have killed the woman, but when the coroner determines it was a human hand and not a horse’s hoof that ended Valerie’s life Thea becomes a person of interest. Now intimidating people with little regard for due process are showing up on her doorstep looking to even the score. Toss in her wrecked love life, a sexy ...

Nobody is more surprised than Billy when he finds himself bleeding out onto his new linoleum floor, a kitchen knife in his chest. Rose, his wife, and Born2Rock, her lover, are leaving for a night on the town. They're sure he'll be dead in no time. So is he. With the help of Consuela, the house keeper, Billy makes it to the hospital. After a short stint in the ICU, he returns to the scene of the crime, home, where he takes up residence in the attic. From this vantage point, Billy watches and waits and plots his revenge.

Dundalk—The Town, to locals—took Aoife in when she left home at eighteen. Now she’s gone from a small-time slinger of hash to a bona fide player in Dundalk’s criminal underworld. Aoife’s smart, savvy, and cool under pressure. Except, that is, when it comes to Annie. Annie is mysterious and compelling, and Aoife is desperate to impress her and keep her close. Unfortunately, not everyone in The Town shares Aoife’s opinion of Annie.

Meet Jack Jordan. He’s a smooth-talking con artist with a penchant for the fast life. He’s snuck into Lufkin, Texas, in the dead of night with little more than a beat-up Honda, a hollowed-out King James Bible full of cocaine, and enough emotional baggage to sink a steamship. He’s charming, dedicated, and extremely paranoid.

It was my father’s arrest that brought me here, although you could certainly say that I took the scenic route. Here is rehab, where Ben - the only son of a rich South Dublin banker - is piecing together the shattered remains of his life. Abruptly cut off, at the age of 27, from a life of heedless privilege, Ben flounders through a world of drugs and dead-end jobs, his self-esteem at rock bottom. Even his once-adoring girlfriend, Clio, is at the end of her tether. Then Ben runs into an old school friend who wants to cut him in on a scam.

The night world of Old Town, Portland, Oregon, has gone mad in the grip of gentrification, and at the center of it all is Lucky Supreme, a seedy tattoo parlor, whose proprietor is a street-bred artist with a unique approach to problem solving. Darby Holland has enough on his radar, but when some flash (tattoo artwork) stolen from him resurfaces in California, he can't help himself. His efforts to reclaim it set him on a dangerous path, dragging along his delightfully eccentric colleagues.

A Deadly Lie. A Billionaire CEO. And a Race Against Time. The war against HealthSync’s lethal neural implants is nearing its end—but the battle hinges on one last target: Siegfried, the elusive CEO of NeuroFusion Systems, the mastermind behind the deadly technology. To take him down, the resistance sends their cunning operative—Marie, a seductive chameleon with nerves of steel. Her cover? A no-nonsense federal tax agent with the power to ruin Siegfried’s empire. Her mission? Get close. Disarm his implant. Extract the truth. But Siegfried is more than just another corrupt billionaire...

IRS agent turned PI Mortimer Angel is relaxing in a hole-in-the-wall bar in a Reno casino when an attractive young girl hires him to find out who left her a cryptic message demanding a million dollars. At the girl’s house, Mort finds the body of missing rapper Jonnie Xenon - Jo-X to his legions of fans - hanging from the rafters with two bullet holes in him. Mort is shocked when he learns the identity of the girl’s father - and even more shocked when the father hires him to investigate the murder.

"Ageless" Hollywood diva Jessica Gray is finishing the last leg of her one-woman show in St. Louis, Missouri, and the nearby town of Chouteau Forest is dazzled. During the show, she humiliates three homeless women onstage, fires her entourage - not for the first time - and makes a bitter enemy of the town's powerful patriarch. After she collapses at an after-show party and is rushed to the hospital, she ignores the advice of her doctors and discharges herself in order to return to LA.

Meet Rowena Halley, a former human rights activist turned academic. Rowena thought teaching on US college campuses would be a lot safer than interviewing torture victims in Russia. Boy, was she wrong. Rowena quickly gets caught up in campus intrigue that threatens to turn deadly. Meanwhile, the life and lover she thought she’d left behind in Moscow might not be so firmly back in the past as she’d believed.

Here, in Lynne Truss' first novel, we meet Osborne Lonsdale, a down-at-heel journalist, mysteriously attractive to women, who writes a regular celebrity interview for Come into the Garden. This week his "Me and My Shed" column will be based on the charming garden outhouse owned by TV sitcom star Angela Farmer. Unbeknownst to Osborne, driving down to Devon to interview Angela in her country retreat, the sleepy magazine has been taken over by new management.

When you look into the abyss...the abyss looks into you. After dumping the body of a serial killer on my former boss’s desk, I handed in my cop badge, which I’ve replaced with an FBI badge. Yep, I’m a Fed. I work for Special Affairs, a clandestine department tasked with policing the occult underground. In the meantime, my personal life is a disaster zone. There’s a Yakuza boss who wants to kill me, and my crazy Hellicorn is going through an existential crisis. But it’s the evil warlock who is making my life a living nightmare.

Nicht nur für Schottland-Liebhaber sondern auch für alle Fans von Spannung mit einem guten Schuss schwarzen Humors: Nachdem sie einen richtig großen Job versaut haben, bleibt drei Glasgower Auftragskillern nur die Flucht auf die karge und schöne Hebriden-Insel Jura, getarnt als Outdoor-Touristen. Ihre Tarnung fliegt auf, doch Juras eigenbrötlerische Einwohner zeigen sich gesprächsbereit; schließlich gilt es zu verhindern, dass ein Milliardär die Insel in einen Golfclub verwandelt.

Failed lawyer Robert Green has such a good plan: Crack three hundred safe-deposit boxes and sail off to South America with his brilliant, morally flexible sister, Penny. If it weren’t for the damned freezing rain. In the dying resort town of Granite Shores, cop Jack Biddle is self-appointed king—mostly of bad decisions. Between his family’s crumbling legacy, a wife who just joined the city council, and life-threatening gambling debts, Jack’s looking for a way out. Then he spots a van spinning off a mountain road into the valley below.

The New Truth is out there... Jack is just an ordinary college student. How has he got involved with shadowy criminals, a deep cover spy, a dodgy businessman, a mysterious internet avatar, a 14th century nun...and a squirrel? And what, exactly, is the New Truth Movement? A genre-bending tale that mixes dry humour, magical realism and new weird elements into a fantastic thriller.

It was a typical afternoon in Northfield, Minnesota, when a middle-aged, autistic artist named Dutton James revealed to the world his new series of otherworldly, enigmatic sculptures, leaving art critics and the public stunned and intrigued. Then the questions started. What are these bizarre objects? From what planet or nightmare were they hatched? In the weeks that follow, as the mysterious artist’s fame skyrockets, Emma, Dutton's millennial stalker fan, attempts to enter the artist’s dangerous, opaque world in order to uncover the answers.