Crime Noir

It is an obsession that has haunted Nick Malick for seven years - to avenge the murder of his young son. In his gut Malick knows who did it. But the psychopath is in prison for another crime, scheduled to be released in a year. All Malick has to do is wait...and survive.

A pair of hit men working a job for a meth kingpin have a very bad day, and the resulting bushfire draws attention to a drug lab and two bodies burned up in a Mercedes. Sergeant Ellen Destry - newly minted head of her department's sex crime unit - and Inspector Hal Challis return in this newest installment of Gary Disher's Peninsula-based crimes series. With meth-related crime on the rise, interdepartmental tensions mount, and Challis soon finds himself fighting to keep control of his case.

Name's Kane, Kate Kane. I'm a paranormal private investigator, which is like a normal private investigator except - and stop me if you're having trouble following this - more paranormal. This business comes with a few basic rules: don't start drinking before noon, don't get your partner killed, don't sleep with the woman who killed him. Last year I broke all of them.

A multicultural nexus, Toronto hosts Indian, Portuguese, African, Italian, and Chinese communities that provide fertile backdrops for Toronto Noir's corrosive exposés. Features brand-new stories by RM Vaughan, Nathan Sellyn, Ibi Kaslik, Peter Robinson, Heather Birrell, Sean Dixon, Raywat Deonandad, Christine Murray, Gail Bowen, Emily Schultz, Andrew Pyper, Kim Moritsugu, Mark Sinnet, George Elliott Clarke, Pasha Malla, and Michael Redhill.

With an FBI sting on his misfit secessionist group closing in, Nat Cinder blasts from Flagstaff to Phoenix on his Triumph Rocket motorcycle. Soon he stumbles onto a packet of photos showing Governor Virginia Rentier lustily paired with three high-ranking women in state government. Though Cinder and the governor clashed 16 years before when his wife died in a car accident, Cinder prefers to keep his dislike of Rentier focused on her politics. But when the bullets fly, Nat asks questions, and learns his sudden war with the governor traces back 16 years.

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.

This collection by crime fiction master Raymond Chandler features four long stories in which private eye Philip Marlowe is hired to protect a rich old guy from a gold digger, runs afoul of crooked politicos, gets a line on some stolen jewels with a reward attached, and stumbles across a murder victim who may have been an extortionist.

It isn’t entirely shocking that a man like film producer Ari Goldstone would be found murdered in his hotel suite, naked and tied to the bedposts. Goldstone, after all, had a reputation for sexual misconduct and was already defending lawsuits brought by a dozen aggrieved starlets. But the brutality of the crime takes even veteran homicide detectives aback. More unsettling still are the DNA test results, which conclusively point to disgraced financier, Jimmy Kwan, the “Chinese Bernie Madoff” and father of one of Goldstone’s accusers.

As a family liaison offer, DC Maggie Neville has seen parents crumble under the weight of their child’s death. Imogen Tyler is no different. Her son’s fall was witnessed by the school caretaker, and another pupil is under suspicion/being questioned, but Imogen is paralysed by questions. Why was he at the school so early? Why was he with a girl who wasn’t a friend?

Joe has witnessed things that cannot be erased. A former FBI agent and Marine, his abusive childhood has left him damaged beyond repair. He has completely withdrawn from the world and earns his living rescuing girls who have been kidnapped into the sex trade. When he's hired to save the daughter of a corrupt New York senator held captive at a Manhattan brothel, he stumbles into a dangerous web of conspiracy, and he pays the price. As Joe's small web of associates are picked off one by one, he realizes that he has no choice but to take the fight to the men who want him dead.

Fast-talking, backstabbing, womanizing, and fiercely ambitious art critic James Figueras will do anything - blackmail, burglary, and beyond - to make a name for himself. When an unscrupulous collector offers Figueras a career-making chance to interview Jacques Debierue, the greatest living - and most reclusive - artist, the critic must decide how far he will go to become the art-world celebrity he hungers to be. Will Figueras stop at the opportunity to skim some cream for himself or push beyond morality's limits to a bigger payoff?

Aidan Waits is back on the night shift, the Manchester PD dumping ground for those too screwed up for more glamorous work. But the monotony of petty crimes and lonesome nights is shattered when he and his partner are called to investigate a break-in at The Palace, an immense, empty hotel in the center of the city. There, they find the body of a man. He is dead. The tags have been cut from his clothes, his teeth have been filed down, and even his fingertips have been replaced...and he is smiling.

When Sam Spade gets drawn into the Maltese Falcon case, we know what to expect: straight talk, hard questions, no favors, and no way for anyone to get underneath the protective shell he wears like a second skin. We know that his late partner, Miles Archer, was a son of a bitch; that Spade is sleeping with Archer's wife, Iva; that his tomboyish secretary, Effie Perine, is the only innocent in his life. What we don't know is how Spade became who he is. Spade & Archer completes the picture.

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.

In this first installment of the Miami Crime Trilogy, Don Donovan spins a sprawling noir tale of three hardened individuals whose lives are woven together in a web of money, betrayal, and murder.

In his seventh hard-boiled tale, New York-based Private Eye Joey Mancuso travels to the lush, verdant shores of Miami Beach. But this is no vacation - Joey’s wading knee deep into a gritty cesspool of corruption, using his street smarts and industry connections to investigate a vast financial conspiracy. A young hedge-fund employee - a kid right out of college, green as can be - was killed by an anonymous sedan while on a motorcycle ride after hitting the South Beach clubs. Miami Beach police don’t seem interested, but Joey does - the kid’s dad is a friend of a friend.

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.

Two men, each unaware of the other, share a common family secret: They were sold for adoption by their American father shortly after their births in the Philippines. Three alternating stories interweave the experiences of father Andrew Breszky and the two sons who try to connect and piece together the puzzle of their reckless, impulsive father. One lives in New York and the other grows up in the south of France, later traveling all over Asia as a documentary filmmaker. Both will discover that their relationships somehow echo that of the young man whose history eludes them.

Bergen Private Investigator Varg Veum is perplexed when two wildly different cases cross his desk at the same time. A lawyer, anxious to protect her privacy, asks Varg to find her sister, who has disappeared with her husband, seemingly without trace, while a ship carrying unknown cargo is heading towards the Norwegian coast, and the authorities need answers. Varg immerses himself in the investigations, and it becomes clear that the two cases are linked, and have unsettling - and increasingly uncanny - similarities to events that took place 36 years earlier.

Piera è una leggenda e ha scritto la storia del teatro italiano. Soprattutto, è ostinata e ribelle, non ama i potenti, e sa bene quant'è sottile la differenza tra il palco e la vita. Del resto, nello spettacolo della commedia umana si mente, si tradisce, si recita a soggetto. E può anche capitare di uccidere. Adesso Piera ha deciso di sfidare Shakespeare e allestire la prima rappresentazione al femminile del Riccardo III. Lei è fatta così. Intanto Roma soffoca nell'afa di luglio. Il delitto, però, non va mai in vacanza.