Noir City

It's early 1944 and Richmond, Virginia is a devil's paradise. Ration scams and police corruption are rampant while the inflated black market commands top dollar. Detective Sergeant Bennie Sherwood, fresh off a soul-scarring tour of duty with the Marines, couldn't care less. His old man was recently murdered under suspect circumstances, and he's on a hunt for the truth. But then an old friend is killed during a botched black market raid and Bennie is thrust onto a hellride through Richmond's underworld.

Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals.

Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books has published over 60 volumes in its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Featuring Noir Series stories from: Dennis Lehane, Don Winslow, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Susan Straight, Jonathan Safran Foer, Laura Lippman, Pete Hamill, Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Child, T. Jefferson Parker, Lawrence Block, Terrance Hayes, and more.

In the wake of a tragedy, 13-year-old Graham moves with his family to Beirut, Lebanon, a city on the edge of the sea and cataclysmic violence. Inquisitive and restless by nature, Graham suspects his State Department father is a CIA operative, and that their family’s fragile domesticity is merely a front for American efforts along the nearby Israeli border. Over the course of one year, 1974, Graham’s life will utterly change. Two men are murdered, his parent’s marriage disintegrates, and Graham, along with his two ex-pat friends, run afoul of forces they cannot understand.

Pete Fernandez is a mess. He’s on the brink of being fired from his middle-management newspaper job. His fiancée has up and left him. Now, after the sudden death of his father, he’s back in his hometown of Miami, slowly drinking himself into oblivion. But when a coworker he barely knows asks Pete to locate a missing daughter, Pete finds himself dragged into a tale of murder, drugs, double-crosses, and memories bursting from the black heart of the Miami underworld - and, shockingly, his father’s past.

A soldier returns home to the damp, gray streets of Willow City to search for his missing brother. Willow City, one of the eight authoritarian city-states of the Federation. Willow City, a world of dark secrets and shadowy characters.

Imagine, the very fact you are alive is a crime punishable by death. What would you do if you were born and raised in a secret lab? How would you react if you learned your identical sister was going to be killed for her body parts? These are all facts young Sarah must deal with. Tall, slender, and with her long, dark hair, Sarah is a striking young woman. Intelligent, caring, and physically fit, she is a natural athlete. Her identical sisters, Ellie and Maria, are equally unique. Ellie is a math prodigy and Maria is one of the most gifted dancers in their region of the galaxy. For this trio...

From the warped mind who brought you Zombies Don’t Surf and the rest of the Guardians of the Apocalypse saga comes a twisted tale of blood and death and magic in a mythical place called The City. Think The Dresden Files meets Sin City, while hanging out with The Warriors in 1947, then crank it up to 11 and hang on for the ride.

When a child vanishes, a city's darkest secrets rise to the surface – and in the shadows of Catalonia, justice comes at a price. Detective Elisenda Domènech is no stranger to grief. Haunted by personal loss and worn down by infighting within the force, she's already on the edge. Then a young boy disappears – the son of a powerful local politician, just days before an election. As pressure mounts to find the child, a wave of violent break-ins is terrorising the city, and Elisenda's key informant has disappeared.

Southern Brooklyn, July 1996. Fire hydrants are open and spraying water on the sizzling blacktop. Punk kids have to make their own fun. Bobby Santovasco and his pal Zeke like to throw rocks at cars getting off the Belt Parkway. They think it's dumb and harmless until it's too late to think otherwise. Then there's Jack Cornacchia, a widower who lives with his high school age daughter Amelia and reads meters for Con Ed but also has a secret life as a vigilante, righting neighbourhood wrongs through acts of violence.

As an amateur PI with a bent moral compass, Ash McKenna is good at finding people - but not at staying out of trouble. Between his own violent tendencies, the shadow cast by his father's death, and a self-destructive revenge quest, he made a mess of his life in NYC. Figuring it was time for a change of scenery Ash relocated to Portland, taking a job as a bouncer in a vegan strip club. And he hasn't had to hit anyone in six months. So when one of the club's dancers asks Ash for help finding her daughter, he declines, content to keep the darkness in his past.

Among the most self-assured and sharply crafted debuts in recent years, Calumet City detonates a Molotov cocktail of character-driven suspense and ghetto-Chicago intrigue. A powerful fiction debut that captures the precise emotional landscape of one cop's hard-bitten life in the trenches. This first-time author joins that rare breed whose fiction is suffused with profound authenticity.

Xeno City, a cross roads in a sprawling multi-species galaxy, is also a city brimming with greed, corruption and murder. Wading through this murky cesspool is J. Azize "Jazz" Singer. A private detective pursuing an honest, or not so honest, buck. When Jazz is told of the death of his childhood friend, Erta L’Hotzuma, a death the local law fails to investigate, he sets out to find out who is responsible and why. His investigation, however, soon meets strong and violent resistance and he begins to suspect he has stumbled onto something bigger than just the death of a friend.

In Victorian London, Margaret Brink, in search of a better life, arrives by train from the countryside. While at the outset she gains employment, after some misfortune, she soon falls by the wayside. Told in the form of a letter, an inquiry from a relative of Margaret's is answered by a minister who did what he could for her. The Troubles of Margaret Brink is a short, but evocative tale from Award Winning author, Robert E. Kearns

The Shades of Gray series follows the adventures of Kat and Kim. Start by reading the first book of this serial series and be introduced to this world of danger and mystery and then read the next book for free also. Noir was a mega-city plagued by a sun blocking mass called Dry Clouds that had mysteriously appeared three decades earlier. The Dry Clouds covered half the planet and forced those living under them to exist in endless night. On this world, corporations were in charge and breaking your contract with them could mean the termination of your life. Kimberly Griffin, a Life Closer (...

Johnny "Whoops" Watson and Billy Bates - young guitarists and singers - and their band, Conflict, are playing clubs in Los Angeles, where the days of rock's zenith have faded, but the hopes and dreams of aspiring musicians haven't. Conflict is struggling, and chaos ensues when someone close to the band is killed. Johnny and Billy are swept up in the mystery, ill-prepared as they are to confront it.

The year is 1794. A young nobleman, Eric Three Roses, languishes in hospital. Some think he would be just at home in the madhouse across the road. Ridden with guilt, he spends his nights writing down memories of his lost love who died on their wedding night. Her mother also mourns her, and when no one listens to her suspicions, she begs the aid of the only person who will listen: Jean Mickel Cardell, the one-armed watchman.

Noir contains three classic thrillers by Richard Matheson, the grand master of suspense. Originally published in the 1950s, at the very beginning of Matheson’s distinguished career, these page-turning classics are finally on audio for your listening pleasure. Now listeners everywhere can savor three unforgettable tales of crime, corruption, and cold-blooded murder.

Kane Kulpa learned which laws could be bent and which broken after a short stint in prison courtesy of Detective Vincent Bayonne. Bound by time, integrity, and the reality of life in Central City, Bayonne and Kane made peace with the past. Now, gang tension spirals from corrupt to deadly, and a series of murders stresses Kane and Bayonne’s uneasy alliance. Kane balances on a razor’s edge to protect his bar, power, life, and family, and Bayonne hustles to keep another lonely man from being strangled.

When Misty Dawn, a former Hollywood Psychic to the Stars, moves into an old craftsman house, she encounters the former owner, the recently deceased Hollywood set designer, Wilson Thorne. Wilson is unaware of his circumstances, and when Misty explains the particulars of his limbo state, and how he might help himself if he helps her, he’s not at all happy. That is until young actress Zoey Chamberlain comes to Misty’s door for help. Zoey has recently purchased The Pink Mansion, a historic Hollywood Hills home, and believes it’s haunted. But when Misty arrives to search the house, it’s ...