Crime City

Those dark and terrible things from your nightmares are very real. They walk among us, masquerading as your neighbor, your lover, even your friend. You see, Empire City is full of them...if you only know where to look. How do I know this? Well, for starters the name is Detective Tom Holliday. I work homicide for Special Crimes. My friends, what few I have, call me Doc. And the other reason? I’ve got magic of my own. Welcome to Empire City, where magic and technology co-exist, and humanity endures behind walls of stone and spell-forged steel.

Almost a hundred years ago, a major terrestrial event reshaped the Earth’s coastlines. Goodbye entire cities. Goodbye entire states. Goodbye entire countries. And when the authorities outlawed salvaging from these sunken sites, why, say hello to a new breed of criminal: underwater reclamation specialists. Even a hundred years later, there’s still a whole lot of loot for the reclaiming.

You may think being a superhero is all about dodging bullets, fancy armor, secret identities, and thwarting supervillains - but not in Spire City. Here, you have to deal with crazy shamanic visions, and Nazi butchers brought to USA after World War II. Need we mention the malevolent thought forms and gangs of freakish mutants? Modern city life is tough enough, but in Spire City even the superheroes are stretched to the breaking point when the villains have better lawyers.

On a hot and humid morning in Port Saint Lucie, Florida, two joggers find the body of 23-year-old Kimberly Levesque. Her lifeless body had been dumped a few feet off the running path, under a bottle palm, the night before. Witnesses saw the car of the man who killed her and wrote down his license plate number. Open and shut case, or so it looks.

Sharon Simpson spent 15 of her younger years in Morgan City, Louisiana, a small, blue-collar town along the Atchafalaya River Delta. Morgan City was living large during the big oil days in the 1970s, yet no one expected what was about to happen to the town. The booming oil industry was desperate for workers to fill positions and used a “trawling net approach” to hire any warm body - as long as the work was getting done on schedule. The heart of the issue - money and greed - led to the hiring of a damaged man who went on a spree, raping and murdering several local teens...

Struggling to forget a crumbling marriage, 40-year-old Anna Lucia Lottol comes to Venice to visit an old friend - but instead of finding solace, she is dragged into the police station and accused of murdering a money-laundering count with whom she had a brief affair. A US Treasury officer with brains and athleticism, Anna fights to clear her name in a seductive city full of watery illusions. As she works to pry information from a cast of recalcitrant characters sometimes denying what she sees and hears, she succeeds in unleashing a powerful foe bent on destroying her.

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.

The kingpins of Oklahoma City, one from the north side and one from the south side, push pounds of weed, gallons of PCP, and kilos of cocaine through the corridors of the OKC, using very different methods to keep their people in line. King is the leader of the north side crew. Along with his protégé, Tippi, he runs his crew with deadly force. Each member knows there is no room for error when it comes to getting money on the north side. Flamboyant, the leader of the south side crew, is the opposite.

A beautiful Southern city distinguished by its homes, towering church steeples, and hospitality, Charleston, South Carolina, has long been associated with the genteel side of Southern living. However, beyond the outward appearances that most people associate with Charleston, there is another side that most visitors and residents would dare not believe is part of the very fabric from which the city's history was woven. Jones leads the listener back to a time when "drinking, eating, and whoring with more than fifty wenches" was perhaps more common in the Holy City than one may imagine.

Mitch Walker is so desperate to save his dying nephew, he commits an insanely dangerous crime in exchange for life-saving medicine. But things go horribly wrong and he unknowingly triggers a chain reaction of carnage, chaos, and murder. Hunted by a ruthless crime syndicate, Mitch's only hope is a cop named Betts who wants him behind bars. When the crime syndicate employs dark tech, the investigation takes an unexpected turn that nobody sees coming. Driven by the faint hope of saving the sick child, both Betts and Walker find themselves working together in a fight for survival.

Aaron Iturra was just 18 years old when he was found dead in his bedroom in Eugene, Oregon. Soon, the quiet community would be rocked and shocked by who was behind the killing: Mary Louise Thompson, also known as Gang Mom. An anti-gang activist, she was a modern day deadly Fagin, running her own gang of juveniles who preyed on the unsuspecting city.

The remarkable lengths Ruderman and Laker go to for the story - chasing down witnesses on the city's grimmest streets, sifting through archive boxes and hours of surveillance tape for crucial clues, and coaxing reluctant victims to come forward - put their determination to balance motherhood with the career they love to the ultimate test.

A mysterious hanging in Helena takes Nick on a historical journey. A cowboy game in Bismarck turned deadly. Family gone wrong led to parricide in Pierre. The carnage of an unsolved mystery in Cheyenne leads to a shocking solution. He witnessed defenestration in Denver, and his photos held a critical clue.

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.

Gruesome Quad-Cities is a collection of true-life stories, most of them rescued from old newspaper accounts published over 100 years ago. Only a few of the events in this audiobook have ever made it into print, except, maybe, in musky-old county histories. Even then, they are lucky to rate a paragraph. Gruesome Quad-Cities covers 16 brutal murders that occurred in Davenport, Moline, Rock Island, Bettendorf, Silvis, Muscatine, and more between 1867 and 1920.

Rushmore “Mac” McKenzie has a lot of old girlfriends, but only one went on to marry the current governor of the state of Minnesota. And only one is calling him with a desperate request to meet in secret. First Lady Lindsay Barrett is carrying an anonymous e-mail that contains the makings of an ugly rumor about her husband, the man about to run for higher office - perhaps even the highest office. Someone says they have evidence that Jack Barrett killed his high school sweetheart. Lindsay says it’s an outright lie, but the truth lies buried decades in the past.

Millions in stolen property, revolting sex crimes, and murder-for-hire were all in the mix for a Las Vegas police detective, as he toiled to take Sin City's most prolific criminal off the streets for good. Detective Bradley Nickell brings you the inside scoop on the investigation, arrest, and conviction of the most prolific repeat offender Las Vegas has ever known.

This book does fall into the same universe as my other series of books I call the Noir series. In those books you can hear about the gritty world of detectives, reporters, and gangsters. Well, that world exists here as well except here you have men and women who are willing to work outside of the law on both sides to get a job done. Whereas the other books focus on the aforementioned detectives, private and otherwise, here the focus is more on the ones that hide who they are.

تعرّضت قصة الطبيب هنري هوارد هولمز الذي عرف اختصارًا باسم الدكتور إتش إتش هولمز (H.H. Holmes) إلى الكثير من الأقاويل والإشاعات خلال سنوات طويلة حتى بات التفريق بين الحقيقة والخيال أمرًا مستحيلًا، نص اعترافه للشرطة وأقواله للصّحافة اشتملت على قتله لسبعة وعشرين (27) شخصًا، لكن بعض من ادعى قتلهم كانوا على قيد الحياة! بينما اختفى الكثير من الأشخاص من معارفه دون أن يعترف بقتلهم، كان مختلًا بكل تأكيد خصوصًا بعد اعتقاله فقد بات يعتقد أنه مسكون وأن ملامح وجهه تتغير إلى ملامح شيطانية.

Erma Johnson lives in a rough part of Baltimore. Gangs are a fact of life. She lost her daughter and grandson to their violence. She's convinced, however, that her grandson wasn't in a gang. Hacker turned private investigator C.T. Ferguson takes her case. The more he looks around, the more he thinks she's right.