Crime Noir

A man wakes to find himself below ground in the abandoned subway stations of New York City. He has no idea how he got there, no idea who he is. In his pocket he finds only a wad of blood-stained cash and a deck of playing cards. Once above ground, he rents out a cheap apartment, previously occupied by an enigmatic artist named Max Leider who’d left most everything behind—books, clothes, personal letters. But most peculiar are a series of paintings, each one of a mysterious woman hidden behind a curtain.

Frankie Avicious is a hard-luck fellow with a sordid past. Living in a dreary meatpacking town, stuck in a loveless marriage, and spending his days slaughtering cattle, Frankie has nothing to look forward to but his next swallow of bargain whiskey. His wife is threatening to leave him, and the local sociopath is threatening to kill him. And then there’s Scarlett Acres, a stripper with a heart of fool’s gold. Frankie can’t stop thinking about her.

Dionysos Mavroulis is a man without a future: a man who embraces destiny and risks everything for love. A refugee from Asia Minor, he escapes Smyrna in 1922 disguised as an old woman. Alienated and plagued by feelings of remorse, he spirals into poverty and seeks solace in the hashish dens around Piraeus. Hitting rock bottom, he meets Aleko, an accomplished bouzouki player. Recognizing in the impoverished refugee a rare musical talent, Aleko offers to teach him the bouzouki.

A year has passed since Pete Fernandez’s latest, closest brush with death. After months of recovery, the newly sober Pete has managed to rebuild his life, contentedly running a small Miami bookstore and steering clear of the dangers of private eye work. So when an aging Cuban mobster asks Pete to find out who killed his drug-addicted jazz-pianist son and to locate his missing daughter-in-law, Pete balks. Until another victim suggests that the murder of the gangster’s son may be connected to the people who nearly ended Pete’s life.

Pete Fernandez has settled into an easy, if somewhat boring life as a PI. The days of chasing murderous killers are behind him. Or are they? When his sometimes partner Kathy Bentley approaches him with a potential new client, Pete balks. Not because he doesn’t need the money, but because the case involves Gaspar Varela, a former Miami police officer serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife—one of the most infamous crimes in Miami history. The client? None other than Varela’s daughter, Maya, who’s doggedly supported her father’s claims of innocence.

Santana Sokolov might be the one person who ties together all the mysteries of Atlantica. Which will probably get her killed. The woman has a penchant for the ancient. When Santana is approached by two enemy factions looking for the same legendary item, she partners with old friend Dick Chambers to enter the wilderness and unlock the mystery.

McGee Ridge, earthquake-rattled and clinging to the thousand-foot cliffs of the Northern California coast, is nestled in one of a very few truly wild places left in the Lower 48. It is also home to a band of off-grid outlaws who vanished behind the famed Redwood Curtain in the 1960s and whose time there is swiftly coming to an end.

The novel centers on Dickie Cornish, a Black streetwise survivor living in a homeless camp near DC's Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Framed for the murder of two of his closest friends and facing life in prison, Dickie crosses paths with wealthy ex-Homeland Security Secretary, Jamie Bracht. Bracht offers him a chance at a new life if Dickie can navigate an underground world to uncover a prize Bracht will stop at nothing to acquire.

Hollywood, 1947. Jack Shannon, a former actor whose promising career was interrupted by the war and ended by a facial scar sustained in combat, is now a studio publicist. He jokes that the only thing he knows about publicity is how to suppress it, but that, in fact, is his real job. He’s a fixer who babysits the studio’s stars and covers up their bad behavior. Everything changes for Jack when Savannah Stevens enters his life.

Atlantica - the forgotten isle, the glittering gem in the cesspool of humanity's future. Anything you do inside your own home is allowed. It is a dog-eat-dog world of millionaires and billionaires. The rest of society beneath them live in ignorance. Those at the top have money, tools, people, assassins, and murderers. One such assassin was a rumor, a myth, a ghost in the night. The Red Countess, the lady Valentina Winters. A player among the elite has something Valentina wants, and she is willing to do most anything to get it.

Joe is a retired Special Forces operative with a bad case of PTSD and some substance abuse issues, moonlighting as a fixer for the most powerful crime families in town. In his newest assignment, Joe is sent to take out a shadowy figure named Zahir, who made the New York crime families' hit list by hijacking heroin shipments bound for US dealers and funneling the money to terror cells. Which means that Gotham's underbelly has brought Joe back to the one place in the world he doesn't want to revisit.

As the old chemical works in Leith are demolished, a long deceased body encrusted in phosphate rock is discovered. Seated at a card table, he has 10 objects laid out in front of him. Whose body is it? How did he die, and what is the significance of the objects? Phosphate Rocks: A Death in 10 Objects unravels the mystery using a mix of real life anecdote, scientific explanation and a touch of fiction, woven together to create a vivid account of the life and decline of a factory over five decades.

Aaron Platt has spent every day of his life breaking his back to scrape a living from the rocky, played-out fields of the Adirondack farm he inherited from his sadistic father. One winter morning, he follows footprints in the snow to his barn and discovers a man freezing to death in a horse stall. What unfolds between the two men, past and present, is a brisk, gritty depiction of crime and punishment. But their harrowing story is more than that, exposing the shocking hypocrisy of the people who live in the nearby bucolic town.

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.

Spenser's out to make war, not love, as he goes after Boston's entire X-rated industry. Pretty teenager April Kyle has disappeared into the city's darkest underworld, and to rescue her, Spencer pits muscle and wit against bullets and bullies.

When a Hollywood-based TV series schedules filming in Boston, Spenser smells trouble. When he signs up to protect the show's star, Jill Joyce, he knows it's on its way. First, there's Jill herself. She's spoiled, arrogant, drugged out -- made worse by fear. Someone is out to get her -- does she imagine it, or is it real?

As Montrealer Catherine Day sets foot in a remote fishing village and starts asking around about her birth mother, the body of a woman dredges up in a fisherman's nets. Not just any woman, though: Marie Garant, an elusive, nomadic sailor and unbridled beauty who once tied many a man's heart in knots. Detective Sergeant Joaquin Morales, newly drafted to the area from the suburbs of Montreal, barely has time to unpack his suitcase before he's thrown into the deep end of the investigation.

Everything seems picture-perfect in the town of Fairview, Connecticut, until one night the unthinkable happens: a young woman, Jenny Kramer, is brutally attacked at a local party. In the hours immediately thereafter, Jenny is given a controversial drug to medically erase her memory of the violent assault. But in the weeks and months that follow, as she heals from her physical wounds, she wrestles with her raging emotional memory.

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.

Explore the world of Maynard Wills, PhD, professor of folklore and fan of the podcast, Video Palace. The podcast followed a man named Mark Cambria, who along with his girlfriend Tamra Wulff, investigated the origins of a series of esoteric white video tapes. Cambria went missing in pursuit of these tapes, but not before hearing whispers of an ominous figure called the Eyeless Man.