Crime Noir

The Akashic Noir series’ forensic study of Southern California sharpens its focus on one of Los Angeles’ most recognized neighborhoods.

Andy Boyd thinks he is the luckiest man alive. Widowed with a young child after his wife dies in childbirth, he is certain that he will never again experience true love. Then he meets Anna. Feisty, fun and beautiful, she's his perfect match.... And she loves his son, too. When Andy ends up in the hospital on his wedding night, he receives his first clue that Anna is not all that she seems. He ignores it; a dangerous mistake that could cost him everything.

Things are going along okay with Dennis' gig at the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino in Tunica, Mississippi, "the Casino Capital of the South", until the day he looks down from the high-dive platform and witnesses a mob hit, Dixie style.

January '42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese residents are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They're wrong. It's an early-warning signal of chaos. There's a murderous fire and a gold heist. There's Fifth Column treason on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, Commies, and race racketeers. It's populism ascendant. There's two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with history.

Joe Kurtz, former investigator and convicted felon, is on parole. But the years he spent in Attica didn't make his old haunts any safer. Back on the streets of Buffalo, he's already marked by a local Mafia don.

Hanson joins the Green Berets fresh out of college. Carrying a volume of Yeats's poems in his uniform pocket, he has no idea of what he's about to face in Vietnam - from the enemy, from his fellow soldiers, or within himself. In vivid, nightmarish, and finely etched prose, Kent Anderson takes us through Hanson's two tours of duty and a bitter, ill-fated return to civilian life in-between, capturing the day-to-day process of war like no writer before or since.

A troubled war hero. A criminal mastermind. And the meeting of two fatal enemies....

Varg Veum receives a surprise visit in his office. A woman introduces herself as his half sister, and she has a job for him. Her goddaughter, a 19-year-old trainee nurse from Haugesund, moved from her bedsit in Bergen two weeks ago. Since then no one has heard anything from her. She didn't leave an address. She doesn't answer her phone. And the police refuse to take her case seriously. Veum's investigation uncovers a series of carefully covered up crimes and pent-up hatreds....

When wildlife photographer Ray Ingalls is murdered in the new owl-protection zone in rural White Rock, New Hampshire, Chief Sam Mason's number-one suspect is his archenemy Lucas Thorne. .... Until a mysterious stranger reveals that the victim was up to a lot more than just taking photographs of endangered owls. Suddenly it appears that a lot more people had motive to want Ray dead. Sam, Sergeant Jody Harris, and their K-9 Lucy now have a fresh batch of suspects, all of whom have secrets they don't want exposed. But when Sam's hopes of putting Thorne away for good dwindle, help comes in the form of an unlikely ally.

In a red brick house on a tree-lined street, DC homicide detective Alex Blum stares at the bullet-pocked body of Chris Doyle. As he roots around for evidence, he finds an old polaroid: the decedent, arm in arm with Arthur Holland, Blum's informant from years ago when he worked at the Narcotics branch. But Arthur has been missing for days. Blum’s only source: Arthur’s girl, Celeste—beautiful, seductive, and tragic—whom he can’t get out of his head. Blum is drawn to her and feels compelled to save her from Arthur’s underworld.

Vancouver is the so-called City of Glass. A nice place, in any case, and much too nice for noir. Looked at from afar, Vancouver may seem idyllic. But living here is different - cold and baffling and occasionally hostile. While outsiders focus on high-test BC bud, locals see a heroin crisis: Vancouver is home to the first legalized safe-injection site in North America, now heavily taxed by overdoses resulting from street drugs cut with fentanyl.

At the age of twenty-four, Griselda Satter lee has already lived two lifetimes. A star of the silver screen, she gives up Hollywood after a year and moves to New York to become a designer. While her ex-husband, Con, is out of town, she is staying in his apartment. Walking back one night, she meets two cheerful young men who want to go home with her - and won't take no for an answer.

In an unnamed city slick with rain, Charles Unwin toils as a clerk at an imperious detective agency. His job: writing reports on cases solved by the palindromic Detective Travis Sivart. When Sivart goes missing and his supervisor is murdered, Unwin is promoted to detective, a rank for which he is woefully unprepared. His only guidance comes from his sleepy new assistant and the pithy yet profound Manual of Detection.

When all contact is lost with two Icelanders working in a harsh and sparsely populated area on the northeast coast of Greenland, Thora is hired to investigate. Is there any connection with the woman who vanished from the site some months earlier? Why are the locals so hostile? And could one of the team staying at the site with Thora be responsible for the disappearances?

Liverpool, 1979: new CID recruit Leigh Borrowdale is seconded to a disturbing murder inquiry: a mysterious death in a decaying building, where the remains of a young man have been found. Tasked with looking into missing persons’ cases to track down the identity of the victim, Leigh comes into contact with the disappeared of a city living through its darkest days of the winter of discontent. As she faces her own family demons and battles the male-dominated world at work, Leigh discovers a connection to two boys feared drowned in the Mersey and links to the murky Liverpool underworld.

Adam Rubinstein and Sunil Rao have been nemeses and reluctant partners since their Uzbekistan days. Adam is a seemingly unflappable American Intelligence officer; Rao is ex-MI6, an addict and rudderless pleasure-hound with an uncanny ability to discern the truth about anything and anyone—except Adam. Adam and Rao have gone their separate ways until they are called back together when a full-sized, 1950s American diner shows up in an English farmer's field and a mysterious death ensues.

The mayor’s brother is missing. A transit cop lies beaten and blinded, her service weapon stolen. A new series of graffiti tags are appearing, linked to an underground group calling themselves The Death of Kings. Class warfare has broken out on the streets of Vancouver, and PI Dave Wakeland finds himself on the front lines―but unsure which side he’s on. Reeling from a bad breakup, and increasingly alienated from the city he calls home, Wakeland nevertheless agrees to look for the missing gun.

Few know the city of Los Angeles the way number one best-selling author and acclaimed suspense master Jonathan Kellerman does. His thrilling novels of psychological drama and criminal detection make the capital of dreams a living, breathing character in all its glamour and infamy. That storied history of fame, seduction, scandal, and murder looms large in Mystery, as Alex Delaware finds himself drawn into a twisting, shadowy whodunit that’s pure LA noir - and vintage Kellerman.

It is deep winter, and the darkness is unending. A private detective named Jaycob Eklund has vanished, and Charlie Parker is assigned to track him down. Parker's employer, Edgar Ross, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has his own reasons for wanting Eklund found. Eklund is no ordinary investigator - he is obsessively tracking a series of homicides and disappearances, each linked to reports of hauntings.

In noir master Raymond Chandler's Playback, Philip Marlowe is hired by an influential lawyer he's never heard of to tail a gorgeous redhead but then decides he'd rather help out the redhead. She's been acquitted of her alcoholic husband's murder, but her father-in-law prefers not to take the court's word for it.