Noir Fiction

She was supposed to be the perfect mother—until the night everything went wrong. When Peyton Hayes survives a horrifying car crash with her six-year-old son, she awakens to a living nightmare: a year of her memories erased, a nagging suspicion that she wasn’t alone in the car, and cryptic warnings scrawled on slips of paper. Everyone insists her life is flawless—her ex-husband suddenly wants back in, her best friend is eerily devoted, and her son flinches whenever she asks about that fateful night. But Peyton’s half-glimpsed flashbacks scream that something far darker lurks beneath ...

In A Suspension of Mercy, a masterpiece of noir fantasy, Highsmith revels in eliciting the unsettling psychological forces that lurk beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.

The body of a young Russian woman washes up on an Icelandic shore. After a cursory investigation, the death is declared a suicide and the case is quietly closed. Over a year later Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavík police is forced into early retirement at 64. She dreads the loneliness, and the memories of her dark past that threaten to come back to haunt her. But before she leaves she is given two weeks to solve a single cold case of her choice.

Inspector Ralph McGinniss, Lord of the Realm, returns to his ancestral seat at Daroonga Castle in Oxfordshire for his annual holidays, only be called upon to investigate the housekeepers’ death from his cousin’s estate. Agnes Tonbridge is found dead on the front lawn. Was this an accident, or a chance to cover up other dealings by the inhabitants? Bedwin Hall is full of surprises. Lady Petunia, the daughter of the house is under suspicion. Ralph’s brother Stephen McGinniss is making a nuisance of himself with the Inspector’s fiancé, Lady Annabelle Frampton. Claire Lane, noted ...

When Jax receives nine missed calls from her older sister, Lexie, she assumes that it’s just another one of her sister’s episodes. Manic and increasingly out of touch with reality, Lexie has pushed Jax away for over a year. But the next day, Lexie is dead: drowned in the pool at their grandmother’s estate. When Jax arrives at the house to go through her sister’s things, she learns that Lexie was researching the history of their family and the property. And as she dives in deeper herself, she discovers that the land holds a far darker past than she could have ever imagined.

His worst enemy becomes his last hope… When Trip Walker’s nemesis, Eddie, survives a brutal attack, Trip is blindsided by Eddie’s bombshell revelation: the person behind the attempted murder is Rose—Trip’s sister. Driven to confront the shocking truth, he must delve into her hidden past, placing him in the crosshairs of a violent gang she once called friends. And with the police circling and old enemies holding grudges, Trip confronts a deadly dilemma. He’s forced to team up with Eddie and his ruthless crew, all while knowing they could betray him at any moment. Caught between ...

On the 20th anniversary of the publication of Barry Gifford's international best seller, Wild at Heart, as well as the anniversary of the Palme d'Or–winning film adaptation by director David Lynch, Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels presents all of the novels and novellas that comprise the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, "the Romeo and Juliet of the South".

In the dying days of 1850, the young detective Charles Maddox takes on a new case. His client? The only surviving son of the long-dead poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his wife Mary, author of Frankenstein. Charles soon finds himself being drawn into the bitter battle being waged over the poet's literary legacy. When a chance discovery raises doubts about the death of Shelley's first wife, Harriet, he starts to question whether she did kill herself—or whether what really happened was far more sinister…

FBI Special Agent Matthew Roarke is closing in on a bust of a major criminal organization in San Francisco when he witnesses an undercover member of his team killed right in front of him on a busy street, an accident Roarke can't believe is coincidental. His suspicions put him on the trail of a mysterious young woman who appears to have been present at each scene of a years-long string of accidents and murders, and who may well be that most rare of killers: a female serial.

It's August 1984, and paperboy Christopher Stewart has gone missing. Hours later, 12-year-old Sammy Cox hurries home from his own paper route, red-faced and out of breath, hiding a terrible secret. Crystal, Sammy's 17-year-old sister, is worried by the disappearance but she also sees an opportunity: the Stewart case has echoes of an earlier unsolved disappearance of another boy, one town over. Crystal senses the makings of an award-winning essay, one that could win her a scholarship - and a ticket out of their small Iowa town.

Addison McKellar isn’t clueless—she knows she and her husband Dean don’t have the perfect marriage—but she’s still shocked when he completely vanishes from her life. At first Addison is annoyed, but as days stretch into a week and she’s repeatedly stonewalled by Dean’s friends and associates, her frustration turns into genuine alarm. When even the police seem dismissive of her concerns, Addison turns to her father’s old friend, legendary Memphis PI Porter Hayes.

Smoke Kings is a powerful and propulsive novel with a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters. Like Steph Cha's Your House Will Pay it explores decades of racial tensions through a fictional landscape where the line between justice and revenge is blurred.

When the body of a man is found dead in his remote, isolated home, DI Tom Janssen and his team struggle to understand what motive there could be to murder such an inoffensive, seemingly placid local character. The man lived alone and was well known in the community, but kept his distance from others, leading a haphazard way of life almost entirely off the grid. What secrets did he hide in his private life that might be worth killing for? As the team are about to understand, even the most nondescript of people can exist in a world darker than most of us will ever see....

Home alone one morning, Sheldon witnesses a dispute between the woman who lives upstairs and an aggressive stranger. When events turn dire, Sheldon seizes and shields the neighbor’s young son from the violence, and they flee the scene. As Sheldon and the boy look for a safe haven in an alien world, past and present weave together, forcing them ever forward to a wrenching moment of truth.

Eli Loveless and Violet Tulane never did learn to coexist peacefully. From the first day of kindergarten until high school graduation, they argued, fought, and competed over anything and everything. They only managed to stop when Eli left their small town, and Violet heaved a sigh of relief. Now he’s back, infuriating as ever, running the kitchen at the high-end wedding venue where Violet works, and competing with her for a life-changing bonus.

"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 ...

My favorite line in my favorite song about Dallas goes like this: Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes / A steel and concrete soul in a warm heart and love disguise... The narrator of Jimmie Dale Gilmore's perfect tune Dallas" is coming to town as a broke dreamer with the bright lights of the big city on his mind. He's just seen the Dallas cityscape through the window of his seat on a DC-9 at night. Is he just beginning his quest?

They call it Company Town - a city-size oil rig off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes, now owned by one very wealthy, powerful, byzantine family: Lynch Ltd. Hwa is of the few people in her community (which constitutes the whole rig) to forgo bioengineered enhancements. As such, she's the last truly organic person left on the rig - making her doubly an outsider as well as a neglected daughter and bodyguard extraordinaire.

Janet Evanovich described SOUND OF BLOOD: "A great read with a shocking ending." TRAGEDY STALKS A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR LOOKING INTO A SUSPICIOUS DEATH WHEN HE FALLS IN LOVE WITH THE WOMAN RESPONSIBLE. Bodies pile up from coast to coast as Jake Scarne uncovers a web of murder and fraud. ***“IF YOU LIKE THRILLING ACTION, CRACKLING DIALOGUE AND A TRAGIC LOVE STORY YOU WON’T SOON FORGET, THEN SOUND OF BLOOD, THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE JAKE SCARNE SERIES, IS JUST A CLICK AWAY!” (John Crudele, New York Post); “A LAWRENCE DE MARIA TITLE GIVES YOU MORE BANG FOR YOUR BUCK THAN JUST ABOUT ...

It’s 1975, and the comic book industry is struggling, but Carmen Valdez doesn’t care. She’s an assistant at Triumph Comics, which doesn’t have the creative zeal of Marvel nor the buttoned-up efficiency of DC, but it doesn’t matter. Carmen is tantalizingly close to fulfilling her dream of writing a superhero book. That dream is nearly a reality when one of the Triumph writers enlists her help to create a new character, which they call “The Lethal Lynx”, Triumph's first female hero.