Crime City

The unexpected killing of Dallas drug king-pin Ricardo Salazar sets everyone on edge. A New York crime family is up in arms about the loss of a major narcotics supplier. The Dallas Police dread the ensuing gang war, but Detectives Rob Soliz and Frank Pierce were on the scene at the time of the shooting. Frank saw a mysterious red-haired woman enter Ricardo’s just moments before the shooting, but she was never seen leaving. Instead, all they found inside the house was a dead man and a voodoo doll at his feet.

Conor McBride has accepted a bargain he may live to regret, if he gets to live at all. Lured by the chance to resume his career as a violinist, he’s agreed to extract a defecting Iranian from Prague. He’s been promised a simple, stitched-up mission, but as he might have expected, it unravels into chaos as soon as he arrives.

Six months after witnessing her foster brother take his own life, Kim finds herself searching for any and everything she believes could assist her in her new obsession: finding her biological parents. In a rage, Kim sets out to reclaim what she holds close, ready and willing to kill any and all who stand in her path.

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.

A body is found on the side of a highway. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter night, all around the northern town of Sudbury and through the lives and dreams of eleven very different people.

The Beverly Hills Supper Club was Vegas before Vegas was cool. It was known as the "Showplace of the Nation" before it burned to the ground in 1977, killing at least 165 people - one of the worst fires in US history. But few knew that the Beverly Hills had a violent past of deadly arson beginning in 1936, when it was taken over by the Cleveland mob that ran "Sin City" in Newport, Kentucky - an open city of prostitution, extortion, gambling, and violence for decades, until new US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy went to war on the mob in 1961.

One phone call. Two lives. Their darkest secrets. Lana needs to sell a holiday, fast. Stuck in Tenerife, in a dead end job, she never expected a response quite like Liam’s. Thousands of miles away a phone rings. Liam never intended to pick up - he’s too busy choosing the quickest way to die. But at least someone should know the truth before he goes, even if that someone is a stranger. As time runs out both are drawn to the other, expressing thoughts they never imagined they would share. When you’re about to die, will your secrets even matter?

Immune to the consequences of immorality, five privileged young men in Bogotá bond over a shared code: worship drugs and drink, exploit women, and scorn the underclass. As males, they declare the right to freedom of pleasure. As friends, only disloyalty to each other is forbidden. When a little girl from the slums disappears, the limits of a perverse and sacred bond will be tested in ways none of them could have imagined.

A one-man crime wave is shaking the peaceful city of Santa Maria, California, and no place is safe. Kenny Trask, an unpredictable, high-strung, shockingly violent convict, has just escaped from prison and is intent on putting together enough cash to bankroll a new life for himself, his ex-cellmate, and the female defense attorney he believes they must “rescue”. Only one man is willing to stand in the way.

Life is supposed to be easy and carefree when you are young, but if you live in Washington, DC, that's not always the case. Flashing back to the 1990s, listeners enter the lives of four black men looking to gain money, power, and respect. These four brothas come from different walks of life, but they have one thing in common: They are trying to make fast money in the harsh inner city. However, when the money comes too easily, there's usually a price attached...the ultimate price.

In the early 1960s, uncertainty and menace gripped New York, crystallizing in a poisonous divide between a deeply corrupt, cynical, and racist police force, and an African American community buffeted by economic distress, brutality, and narcotics. On August 28, 1963 - the day Martin Luther King Jr. declared "I have a dream" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial - two young white women were murdered in their Manhattan apartment. Dubbed the Career Girls Murders case, the crime sent ripples of fear throughout the city, as police scrambled fruitlessly for months to find the killer.

After the fight of a lifetime in The Devil Always Collects, Alexandra is living her dream, merging socially conscious public relations with investigative journalism to laud the good organizations and persecute the bad within New Orleans. Lockstep with her dashing man, Tom, the two enjoy the cultural riches of Creole country, successful in their careers and free from typical family obligations.

When a priest is brutally gunned down in front of St. Jerome's Chinese-American Catholic Church, Father Luis Chavez is asked by the archdiocese to lead an inquiry. With the confessed killer already in custody, it looks like an open-and-shut case. That is, until Father Chavez digs deeper. As the killer's confession unravels, Father Chavez teams up with Deputy District Attorney Michael Story to get to the bottom of it. Together, they discover a conspiracy leading back to one of the world's oldest criminal organizations.

A year after the death of her husband, Emerald Vasquez runs into his mistress Akira when leaving the cemetery. The sight of the woman he impregnated and left his fortune to reignites the flames of fury within her, sending Emerald down a path of Revenge.

Jaded reporter Andrew and his photographer boyfriend, Carlos, are sick of telling just another story. From cartel massacres to corrupt politicians, sifting the dregs of Mexico's drug war, they think they've seen it all. But when they find a body even the police are too scared to look at, what started out as just another reportage becomes the sort of story all reporters dream of. Until Carlos pushes for answers too fast and winds up murdered, leaving Andrew grief-stricken and flailing for answers, justice and revenge.

Detective Stefan Gillespie arrest Herr Keller under suspicion of carrying out illegal abortions and encounters Hannah Rosen desperately trying to find her friend Susan, a Jewish woman who had become romantically involved with a priest. When the bodies of a man and woman are found buried in the Dublin mountains, each with a single hole from a pistol in their skulls, Stefan soon finds himself immersed in a complex case as he tries to piece together the mystery of the missing woman.

The city is firmly held in the grip of fear as a serial killer lurks in the shadows, claiming a new victim each week. The killer preys on young women with seemingly nothing in common except to have somehow caught his eye. With the discovery of each new victim the city descends deeper into the shadows, consumed by the desire to escape the killer's grip. The efforts of the police task force is complicated by the appearance of a copycat killer, a news leak from one of their own, and little to no physical evidence.

Every day Charles Schine rides the 8:43 into New York City to do the job he has done for over a decade...until the day he is late for his regular train, and sits down across from the woman of his dreams. He is about to discover that once you leave the straight and narrow, getting back on track is the most perilous journey of all. And for Charles, that journey - of lies, terror, and deception - has just begun.

A twelfth dynasty mummified princess, in a huge sarcophagus, is about to take a long voyage from New York City to Cairo as part of a routine museum exchange. But Cleopatra is missing, and in her place is the not-so-mummified body of a much younger woman. Assistant D.A. Alex Cooper must explore the elegant Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the array of beasts and bones at the Museum of Natural History. Somewhere, deep within the bowels of one of these great cultural centers, a killer may wait.

Nichelle Tramble's first novel, The Dying Ground, was named a Best Book of 2001 by the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. In this follow-up work, Maceo returns home after drifting for two years. He finds his friends tangled up in a murder case, and he must act fast to save them.