Hard Crime

Hard Luck is an evocative collection of seventeen stories that glimpse into the lives of the often broken and downtrodden people in small-town southern Indiana. Some residents escape while others are consumed by their drug-fueled, crime-ridden environments. A man’s love triangle goes awry in CRANKED. Sex, drugs, and gambling seduce the characters in LOOKING FOR ACTION. In the title story, HARD LUCK, a hard-drinking sheriff enforces his own kind of law. A once imprisoned biker returns to his hometown to witness a backwoods, bare-knuckle brawl in THE FIGHT. In the dark, hillbilly gothic ...

Sergeant Logan McRae is in trouble.... His missing-persons investigation has just turned up a body in the woods - naked, hands tied behind its back, and a bin bag duct taped over its head. The Major Investigation Team charges up from Aberdeen, under the beady eye of Logan's ex-boss, Detective Chief Inspector Steel. And, as usual, she wants him to do her job for her.

Alcatraz inmate #1186 was Charles Edward Hopkins, and Mr. Hopkins was no ordinary inmate. Not only did he serve time with the Anglin brothers who made the only successful escape from Alcatraz, but he was well-acquainted with notorious crime boss "Bumpy" Johnson, the legendary Italian mafia boss Vito Genevese, and many other infamous Alcatraz inmates. Never before has Charlie's full story been captured and shared with the public. Now at 87 years old, Mr. Hopkins is estimated to be one of the last five or six remaining inmates that served hard time in Alcatraz before its closing.

When Robin Nevins, the son of Hawk's boyhood mentor, is denied at an exclusive university, Hawk asks Spenser to investigate. It seems the denial is tied to the suicide of a young gay activist, and as Spenser digs deeper, he is nearly drowned in a multicultural swamp of politics: black, gay, academic, and feminist. At the same time, Spenser's inamorata, Susan, asks him to come to the aid of an old college friend, K.C. Roth, the victim of a stalker. Spenser solves the problem a bit too effectively when K.C. turns the tables and begins to stalk him.

The State of Jones is a true story about the South during the Civil War, the real South. Not the South that has been mythologized in novels and movies, but an authentic, hardscrabble place where poor men were forced to fight a rich man's war for slavery and cotton. In Jones County, Mississippi, a farmer named Newton Knight led his neighbors, white and black alike, in an insurrection against the Confederacy at the height of the Civil War.

On New Year's Day, a dog finds a bone in the Hollywood Hills - and unearths a murder committed more than 20 years earlier. It's a cold case, but for Detective Harry Bosch, it stirs up memories of his childhood as an orphan. He can't let it go. As the investigation takes Bosch deeper into the past, a beautiful rookie cop brings him alive in the present. No official warning can break them apart - or prepare Bosch for the explosions when the case takes a few hard turns.

Bramfield, near Leeds, a sleepy little market town nestled on the borders of West and North Yorkshire. Detectives Stewart Gardener and Sean Reilly discover the naked corpse of Alex Wilson, nailed to the wall of a cellar in his uncle's hardware store. His lips are sewn together, and his body bears only one mark, a fresh scar near his abdomen. Within 48 hours, their investigation results in dead ends, more victims, no suspects and very little in the way of solid evidence.

Dolan, a private investigator and former Army Ranger, takes up the case of a missing seventeen-year-old girl after he learns that the cops are doing nothing. Not only is he the girl’s best chance: he’s her only chance. But she has a stunningly-attractive aunt, who's insisting on taking part in the chase. And that's not the only danger. As the trail leads up into the mountains and he closes in on finding her, Dolan begins to realize that he might be in over his head. And the hunter might just become the hunted.

With nothing left to live for, Inspector Sullivan accepts the most dangerous assignment a cop can have. He goes undercover to help break up a human trafficking ring. Reeling from guilt and loss, Sullivan dives into his undercover role of enforcer for the local mob in Brill City on the planet Minaria Prime. Alcohol and violence quickly become Sully’s only friends. What starts out as a straightforward undercover job turns into a case filled with political intrigue, serial killers, and a galaxy wide human smuggling cartel. Follow Sully as he works to keep his sanity while trying to stop ...

On a visit to Northern Ireland, newspaper reporter Sam Briscoe meets with a mysterious IRA leader and agrees to deliver an envelope to his supporters in New York City. It's a decision with grave consequences - not just for Briscoe, but for his 11-year-old daughter as well. Because the bloody Irish conflict is about to come to the streets of New York, and Briscoe is the only man standing in its way...

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 Book Two, Nick Kilmer continues south on his ride with Deacon through Arizona and encounters a family that he befriended and helped during their most dire circumstances during their introduction into the United States. Escaping the wrath of Sadaam Hussein's forces that wants to eliminate the Kurds, Fatima's family and is granted asylee status. Nick finds himself influencing the single mother with five teenagers as they navigate into American Society. They disappear for 15 years, an unlikely reunion brings with them despicable Iranian opium smugglers and Mexican Cartel members. A disabled...

Oslo, New Year’s Eve. The annual firework celebration is rocked by an explosion, and the city is put on terrorist alert. Police officer Alexander Blix and blogger Emma Ramm are on the scene, and when a severely injured survivor is pulled from the icy harbour, she is identified as the mother of two-year-old Patricia Smeplass, who was kidnapped on her way home from kindergarten 10 years earlier and never found. Blix and Ramm join forces to investigate the unsolved case.

Deadlock, V. I. Warshawski’s second case, involves the huge Great Lakes shipping industry. Once again the subject is murder - this time the “accidental death” of Boom-Boom Warshawski, an ex-hockey star and V. I.’s beloved cousin, who fell - or was pushed - off a rain-slicked pier on Chicago’s busy waterfront. Convinced that Boom-Boom was in fact killed because of information he had uncovered about criminal doings on the shipping lines, V. I. begins a long and frustrating search for her cousin’s murderer.

The past has a way of catching up to you... Following the explosive events of End Game, American private investigator Thomas Blume is battling to come to terms with a changed British city he helped to create. But when a young woman is brutally murdered, he finds himself dragged into a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a serial killer targeting victims that are all too familiar. Taken across the dark, treacherous streets of modern London, Blume searches through a decades-old conspiracy, digging up secrets that make him question if even the police can be trusted. But with time running out ...

Jesse Stone is back on the job after a stint in rehab, and the road to recovery is immediately made bumpy by a series of disturbing and apparently racially motivated crimes, beginning with the murder of an African American woman. Then, Jesse's own deputy Alisha - the first black woman hired by the Paradise police force - becomes the target of a sophisticated frame-up. As he and his team work tirelessly to unravel the truth, he has to wonder if this is just one part of an even grander plot, one with an endgame more destructive than any of them can imagine.

Henry "Hank" Thompson's got a good thing going - a hut on a quiet Mexican beach, morning swims, a nice breakfast place a few miles down shore…until a backpacker with a Russian accent shows up and starts asking questions about his past. Questions Hank doesn't want to deal with. And then the backpacker mentions the money…and Hank's parents. So Hank makes a fateful move…because no one threatens Hank's family.

Nightmare Alley is American author William Lindsay Gresham’s first and best-known work. The novel - most admired by noir fiction fans - was published in 1946, adapted into a film in 1947 starring Tyrone Power and subsequently printed as a graphic novel by Spain Rodriquez. During the 1940s Gresham worked as an editor for a genuine crime pulp magazine in New York, during which period he wrote this book; characters range from hustlers to Machiavellian femme fatales in a dark world of show business.

Swan Peak finds Detective Robicheaux far from his New Iberia roots, attempting to relax in the untouched wilderness of rural Montana. He, his wife, and his buddy Clete Purcell have retreated to stay at an old friend's ranch, hoping to spend their days fishing and enjoying their distance from the harsh, gritty landscape of Louisiana post-Katrina.

At first, Archy McNally was unofficially enlisted to verify the bona fides of a deal for a rare Faberg Imperial egg, created exclusively for the doomed Czar Nicholas in 1917. But when Edythe Westmore's son and daughter become convinced the trinket is a fake and their mother is being conned, McNally is asked to deep-six the whole deal.