Crime City

After shedding her biggest vice, Kim would hope to find herself happy, free, and finally able to live in peace, but life could never be so kind to her. Four years after its fall, Kim and the surviving members of The Pool find themselves the targets of several random attacks, each one leaving them with more questions than answers.

A cross between Shaft, Mike Hammer, and Body Heat, Dead in the Rose City is a taut, hard-boiled detective novel in which nothing is quite what it seems. Dean Jeremy Drake, nicknamed D.J., is a Jamaican-Italian private investigator and ex-homicide detective for the Portland Police Bureau. He is six-five, hip, tough, armed with a .40 caliber Glock, and courts danger and romance with equal abandon. Those qualities are put to the test when Drake is framed for murder in the midst of two seemingly unrelated cases.

In the early 1970s, three African American men - Wiley Bridgeman, Kwame Ajamu, and Rickey Jackson - were accused and convicted of the brutal robbery and murder of a man outside of a convenience store in Cleveland, Ohio. Almost four decades later, the men were exonerated. But while their exoneration may have ended one of American history’s most disgraceful miscarriages of justice, the corruption and decay of the city responsible for their imprisonment remain on trial.

‘To make a killing in the City’ is a phrase often used within the financial world, to indicate making a large profit on investments, or through dealings on the stock market--the bigger the profit, the bigger the killing. However, Tom Kendall, a private detective, on vacation in London, has a different kind of killing in mind when he hears about the death of one of his fellow passengers who traveled with him on the plane from Miami. It was suicide apparently, a simple overdose of prescribed tablets. Kendall immediately offers his help to Scotland Yard. He is shocked when he is told his services will not be required. They can manage perfectly well without him, thank you.

To ex-detective John Barnes, the machine is a dangerous and abhorrent addiction. The criminal thoughts it embedded in his brain helped him stop a serial killer, but they left him dazed - with pounding, murderous impulses. Having turned in his badge to salvage what’s left of his psyche, Barnes must return to the darkness at the request of his former partner. A little girl has gone missing. So has Adrian Flaherty, the detective in the kidnapper’s shadow. And only Barnes can hear the clues. But the trail is more dizzying and more personal than he feared.

Just two months after the search for her parents almost cost her everything she holds close, Kim is presented with another opportunity to find them. She struggles with the choice of taking the chance again fearing the possible consequences, adding more stress on top of her normal daily woes.

Isa and Puo are enjoying a quiet, uneventful, completely lawful time in Vancouver, Canada, that is, until someone tries to blow them up. But before they even have time to recover at the hospital, they’re forced on the run for their lives.

When a major Parisian modern art event gets unexpected attention on live TV, Chief of Police Nico Sirsky and his team of elite crime fighters rush to La Villette park and museum complex. There, renowned artist Samuel Cassian is inaugurating the first archeological dig of modern art, 27 years after burying the leftovers of a banquet. In front of reporters from around the world, excavators uncover a skeleton. Could it be the artist's own son?

Summer, 1962. A scorching heat wave is suffocating LA. PI Jim Keegan is offered a small fortune to find a beautiful woman from a set of photographs. He refuses; the job seems suspicious. But the next day the same woman, Eve, turns up, unbidden, on his doorstep. Eve fears for her safety. She is being watched. Before Keegan knows it, someone has been killed with Keegan’s own gun, and he gets sucked into a world of suspicion and betrayal where he’s never quite sure where the truth lies....

After inheriting a farm on New Zealand’s South Island, Lewis Harding tries his best to keep it running. The financially strapped farmer is forced to forage his new land for implements, eliciting the help of his son Gary. But when they go too close to the entrance of an old deserted gold mine, catastrophe strikes in more ways then one. When Gary’s older brother, Dr. Cecil Harding, shows up at the farm, Nekenhalle, he discovers that his brother and father had gone missing.

Curious about the modern love affair with criminal personalities, investigative reporter Conor Woodman spent four years exploring the hidden depths of dynamic cities across the globe. Sharks takes us on a journey through the lawless backstreets of cities as diverse as Mumbai, Bogotá, New Orleans, Barcelona and London. In each he uncovers the people and the scams that keep the global black economy moving.

Orphaned and homeless in New York City at 14 years old, Carlo Juliano lived on the streets to survive until a local crime family boss, Johnny Toracio, gave him a job, a place to live, and mentoring for his new life as a gangster. For the next few years, Carlo befriended leaders of construction scams, art theft rings, drug cartels, biker gangs, extortion rackets, gambling, and cybercrime.

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.

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.