Noir Fiction

Appie Knoll is the kind of suburb where kids grow up right. But something is wrong. Fourteen-year-old Kevin Bartlett disappears. Everyone thinks he's run away -- until the comic strip ransom note arrives. It doesn't take Spenser long to get the picture -- an affluent family seething with rage, a desperate boy making strange friends...friends like Vic Harroway, body builder. Mr. Muscle is Spenser's only lead and he isn't talking...except with his fists

Newlyweds Keith and Kit Collins can hardly believe their luck when the general manager of the iconic, opulent Pink Hotel invites them to come for a luxurious stay as a bid to hire Keith. Kit loves their small-town life, but Keith has always wanted more, and the glittering, lily-scented lobby makes him feel right at home. Soon after their arrival, wildfires sweep through the surrounding mountains and Los Angeles becomes a pressure cooker, with riots breaking out across the city amid rolling blackouts.

TOUGHER THAN THE DEVIL BY A DAMN SIGHT His mother was a remnant of the Southern Creole Quadroon in the French Quarter. His father was heir to the Avondaire fortunes in northern Idaho. Can Randulet Thibodeaux split his time and loyalties between the sultry, strumming South, and the pious, pristine north? He discovers that he has been born under the same mysterious prophecy that richly blessed the lives of previous Avondaire generations, but he’s as improper in one place as the other. He was born in brackish water for a purpose! Balancing the peculiarities of the past, and the experiences ...

Isaiah Hightower has everything a forty-nine-year-old man could want: respect as a high school principal; admiration as a leader in the black community; and a wife who would do anything for him.Despite his shining public image, Isaiah's life is plagued with indiscretions. When these threaten to unravel his world, he silences the threat by any means necessary.When his wife, Yvette, witnesses her husband's greatest sin, her life is about to change forever. But it doesn't have to. One lie will protect her lifestyle and save her husband's reputation.

Witnessed by a throng of gaping spectators, a charismatic Marine sergeant is murdered under a Bangkok bridge inside a bolted-shut Mercedes Benz. Among the witnesses are the only two cops in the city not on the take, but within moments one is murdered and his partner, Sonchai Jitpleecheep - a devout Buddhist and the son of a Thai bar girl and a long-gone Vietnam War G.I. - is hell-bent on wreaking revenge. On a vigilante mission to capture his partner’s murderer, Sonchai is begrudgingly paired with a beautiful FBI agent named Jones....

Los Angeles, 1916: Photographer Bill Ogden has opened a portrait studio in the seedy noir world of early Hollywood, where he is joined by his granddaughter, Flavia—a woman in need of a fresh start after bludgeoning her abusive husband to death in Wichita. Though his business is mainly legit, Bill finds himself brushing up against the “blue movie” porn industry growing in the shadows of the motion picture mainstream. When a series of grisly murders take place across the city, Bill and his capable granddaughter are pulled into events as tricky and tangled as anything this side of The Big Sleep.

Summer has come to Atlantic City but the boardwalk is empty of tourists, the casino lights have dimmed, and two Jane Does are laid out in the marshland behind the Sunset Motel, just west of town. Only one person even knows they’re there. Meanwhile, Clara, a young boardwalk psychic, struggles to attract clients for the tarot readings that pay her rent. When she begins to experience very real and disturbing visions, she suspects they could be related to the recent cases of women gone missing in town.

The year is 2008. Reza Malek’s life is modest but manageable - he lives in a small apartment in Harlem, teaches at a local university, and is relieved to be far from the blood and turmoil of Iraq and Afghanistan, where he worked as a reporter, interpreter, and sometimes lover for a superstar journalist who has long since moved on to more remarkable men.

Mick Hardin is an Army CID officer home on leave, recovering from an IED attack and flirting with prescription painkillers, when a body is found in the center of town. It’s Barney Kissick, the local heroin dealer, and the city police see it as an occupational hazard. But when Barney’s mother, Shifty, asks Mick to take a look, he finds there’s more to the killing than it seems. Mick should be rehabbing his leg, signing his divorce papers, and getting out of town—and most of all, staying out of the way—but he keeps on looking, and suddenly he’s getting shot at himself.

On Easter weekend, a guest at a luxury ski lodge in Åre is stabbed to death in her plush suite. She’s Charlotte Wretlind, a property developer who planned to restore a nearby mountain hotel to its long-gone glory days. It was not a random attack. It was an act of pure aggression leveled against a woman with plenty of enemies. As the murder spreads panic among tourists and Åre residents alike, Detective Inspectors Hanna Ahlander and Daniel Lindskog face a shady staff, a dogged press, and multiple suspects.

Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt”, he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends.

In the remote cattle country of Western Australia's Kimberley, where seasonal flooding transforms the landscape into a vast inland sea, Special Investigator Odysseus "Odie" Kalaris is summoned when rising waters uncover human remains near Warrigal Creek Station. What begins as the discovery of decades-old bones evolves into something far more sinister, revealing connections between historical water rights manipulation and powerful interests still operating today. When a station hand researching the same water dispute goes missing in suspiciously similar circumstances, Odie must navigate ...

Grant McAllister, a professor of mathematics, once sat down and worked all the rules out – and wrote seven perfect detective stories to demonstrate. But that was 30 years ago. Now Grant lives in seclusion on a remote Mediterranean island, counting the rest of his days. Until Julia Hart, a brilliant, ambitious editor knocks on his door. Julia wishes to republish his book, and together they must revisit those old stories: An author hiding from his past and an editor keen to understand it.

While working one afternoon on the Northern Divide, a young tree-marker makes a grisly discovery: in a squatter's cabin near an old mill town, a family has been murdered. An army vet coming off a successful turn leading a task force that took down infamous biker criminals, Detective Frank Yakabuski arrives in Ragged Lake, a nearly abandoned village, to solve the family's murder. But no one is willing to talk. With a winter storm coming, Yakabuski sequesters the locals in a fishing lodge as he investigates the area with his two junior officers.

It has been three years since Detective Jonathan Stanton solved the most brutal murder in San Diego's history, and as a result found himself in the middle of the worst police corruption scandal in memory. Choosing a less high-profile position, Stanton is nevertheless reluctantly dragged into the violent world of The Sandman. The Sandman is clever, ruthless, and cautious. He leaves no evidence in his wake and takes a morbid interest in those that chase him. Believing Stanton to be his parallel, he finds an affinity for the detective. One that Stanton may not survive.

Doyle Redmond, 35-year-old nowhere writer, has crossed the line between imagination and real live trouble. On the lam in his soon-to-be ex-wife's Volvo, he's running a family errand back in his boyhood home of West Table, Missouri - the heart of the red-dirt Ozarks. The law wants his big brother, Smoke, on a felony warrant, and Doyle's supposed to talk him into giving up. But Smoke is making other plans: he is about to harvest a profitable patch of homegrown marijuana.

He calls himself Alvin Limardo, and the job he has for Kinsey is cut-and-dried: locate a kid who's done him a favor and pass on a check for $25,000. Stiffed for the retainer, Kinsey finds out Limardo's real name is John Daggett...ex-con, ex-liar, ex-alcoholic, currently dead.

Atlantica - the forgotten isle, the glittering gem in the cesspool of humanity's future. Anything you do inside your own home is allowed. Those with obscene wealth find it a haven, while every major country of in the world craves the secrets they believe are buried in the mist. Where mystery happens, John Chambers can exist: ex-soldier, gritty realist, detective. It's whispered that John "Dick" Chambers is the man you go to when you need someone who can't be bought.

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.

When Jackie is released from prison, his boss Pino sends a limo to pick him up. Even fresh out of the joint, ruthless Jackie is ready to work, collecting money for the mob and using his special training to take care of bad accounts—permanently.