Humorous Noir

What drives someone to murder? Logan McRae's personal history is hardly squeaky clean, but now that he works for Professional Standards he's policing his fellow officers. When Detective Inspector Bell turns up dead in the drivers seat of a crashed car, it's a shock to everyone. Because Bell died two years ago. They buried him. Or they thought they did. As an investigation is launched into Bell's stabbing, Logan digs into his past. Where has he been all this time? Why did he disappear? And what's so important that he felt the need to come back from the dead?

With an FBI sting on his misfit secessionist group closing in, Nat Cinder blasts from Flagstaff to Phoenix on his Triumph Rocket motorcycle. Soon he stumbles onto a packet of photos showing Governor Virginia Rentier lustily paired with three high-ranking women in state government. Though Cinder and the governor clashed 16 years before when his wife died in a car accident, Cinder prefers to keep his dislike of Rentier focused on her politics. But when the bullets fly, Nat asks questions, and learns his sudden war with the governor traces back 16 years.

After Brooklyn mob widow Rena Ruggiero hits her 80-year-old neighbor Enzio in the head with an ashtray when he makes an unwanted move on her, she embarks on a bizarre adventure. Taking off in Enzio’s ’62 Impala, she retreats to the Bronx home of her estranged daughter, Adrienne, and her granddaughter, Lucia, only to be turned away by Adrienne at the door. Their neighbor, Lacey “Wolfie” Wolfstein, a one-time Golden Age porn star and retired Florida Suncoast grifter, takes Rena in and befriends her.

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.

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.

Brad Hunter is doing everything he can to keep his private investigation agency open, but the women of Honolulu keep distracting him from his work. His latest desire, a Chinatown barmaid, occupies too much of his time, and his money. At least until she is eliminated from his life the hard way--by murder. Within hours, his HPD detective brother puts Brad at the the top of the prime suspect list. Now that he is being scrutinized by the Honolulu Police Department, Brad heads to Chinatown to start his own investigation. What does Brad find first? A new woman, of course.

Bryson Wilde, investigator for hire, lives in an edgy world where the dames are dangerous, cigarettes dangle from ruby-red lips, and the nights are hotter than whiskey-soaked jazz. In R. J. Jagger’s riveting noir thriller, A Way with Murder, Wilde finds himself entangled in two deadly assignments, one for a young, raven-haired attorney on the run after visiting an archeological site in Mexico, and the other for a pretty, little doll-face, who is too mysterious to trust and too hypnotic to resist.

Meet Tommy Martini, the monk with an anger management problem. His meditations are interrupted by a legacy from his uncle, a crooked priest. Arriving in a New Age Arizona town to claim his inheritance, Brother Tommy meets a charismatic, smoking-hot cult leader who claims that women are being impregnated by alien beings while they sleep. Tommy’s own sleep is disturbed - by cartel hitmen, Mafia bill collectors, and women intrigued by his vow of chastity.

Jan Nyman, the ace detective of the covert operations unit of the National Central Police, is sent to a sleepy seaside town to investigate a mysterious death. Nyman arrives in the town dominated by a bizarre holiday village - the ‘hottest beach in Finland’. The suspect: Olivia Koski, who has only recently returned to her old hometown. The mission: find out what happened, by any means necessary.

Shirley Lyle hooks for a living. She’s a big girl who keeps her profile low. But when a drug lord and his son toss her trailer, she adds a couple letters to her name. Now, she’s killed the drug lord’s son and two meth zombies. Fed up, ready to set fire to her past, her job - and her trailer - she’s dragged back into the role she’s forsworn by a man who presses her buttons with a hammer. Shirley realizes she’ll never be more than a 400-pound hooker. But when her partner-in-revolution, Ulyana the Ukrainian stripper, disappears, Shirley puts flame to fuse.

Spring is in the air. Gus is feeling pretty good about the change in seasons until an unknown man decides he would rather change from being alive to being dead. He clearly drank something toxic, and it didn’t agree with him. The question is, did he really decide to do that, or did someone make that decision for him. Only that question is buried under a lot of other layers of questions. Why did the man visit Gus a few days before his death proclaiming the end times were near? Why didn’t he take enough poison to kill him near instantly instead of lingering around for days slowly dying? ...

California Dreaming: How Not to Become a Hollywood Screenwriter is the entertaining and often hilarious tale of one man’s cinematic obsession and his attempt to get a movie deal done in the place where dreams are made. James J. Caterino is the author of Fantastic Films, Cult TV Shows, and Perfect Pop Songs, To Meghan, The Geek Girl and the Quarterback, and Miami Noir 1987.

In the second book in the Dead Jack series, the zombie detective hits rock bottom, bingeing on fairy dust and formaldehyde 24/7. Reluctantly, he sets out with a fellow zombie, the narcissistic Garry, to find his long-lost soul. But a new threat emerges: a neo-Nazi group that hunts down the depressed corpse, believing his sidekick Oswald has the power to capture all the souls in Pandemonium. Again, the wicked world needs saving, but this time can Jack also save himself?

"Get ready for an intense ride through the dark and gritty streets of Manchester in this brutal and lyrical crime thriller. As the hedonistic club scene of the 90s rages on, a girl falls to her death from the stage, unnoticed by most. But for John Black, an ex-SAS soldier working security that night, her death will change everything. Now in witness protection after exposing the city's underworld, he returns to Manchester to help a grieving mother find answers to her son's suicide. But as he delves deeper into the case, strange recordings hint at a disturbing increase in sexual depravity in ...

Rock star Castor Greaves and his model girlfriend vanished twenty years ago after an infamous gig in Soho. According to urban myth they’re still alive - holed up somewhere by the Golden Road, a fabled music-industry 'disappearing' service - so when PI Kenny Gabriel is hired to solve the notorious case, he knows he’ll need to watch his back. But Kenny’s life is in danger already: a brain tumour is messing with his mind, and he may well have nothing to lose. Stalking the seedy clubs and backstreets of Soho, he makes a gruesome discovery....

Looking into the "suicide" of his lover's ex-husband sounds like a hairball to a private investigator. But he never imagined it could get him killed! Alton Rhode travels to San Francisco to investigate an alleged suicide and winds up ensnared in a web of cryptocurrency-fueled murder and international intrigue! The private eye knows a lot about murder and almost nothing about bitcoins. But he soon gets educated about the latter with the help of an unorthodox but brilliant young woman. And his own expertise comes in very handy when he runs into a bunch of Russians and Chinese whose motives ...

Past events cast shadows you can't outrun. Wayne and Phil knew that better than anyone, after what happened when they were children, bullied by Wayne’s murderous brother. When Tyrone returns after many years, bent on revenge, they are about to be drawn back into his dangerous world. Book One of the Phil Tyler Crime Thriller series.

Gus is having one of the best things a man that works in law enforcement can have, a very slow day. His slow day only gets better when he discovers that an ice cream shop is opening near the law enforcement complex. Even though the ice cream shop only serves gelato, that’s not enough to spoil his good mood on this slow day. The only real way his slow day could get ruined was if someone mysteriously dropped dead in the yoga studio across the street from the ice cream shop while at nearly the same time Father Xavier volunteered him to speak at the weekly Tuesday prayer breakfast at town ...

Resourceful Bingo Riggs and his partner, Handsome Kusak, are in the sucker-bait business, snapping candid pics of tourists off Central Park. Their fly-by-night enterprise can be irresistible to souvenir lovers, but with one camera in a pawnshop and their developing room in the bathtub of a two-room dump near Hell’s Kitchen, their venture is wretchedly underexposed - until they stumble upon an insurance fraud scheme between the allegedly dead eccentric Mr. S. S. Pigeon and his business partner and beneficiary.

The Black Mass of Brother Springer tells the story of Sam Springer, a drifter novelist who meets Jack Dover, the retiring Abbot of the Church of God's Flock. Dover's final official act is to ordain Springer and send him off to serve as pastor of an all-Black church in Jacksonville, Florida. Springer soon becomes entangled in the city's growing civil rights movement...and with the church deacon's earthy young wife, Merita.