Crime Noir

It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse—and concealing the cause of death.

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. In Hong Kong Noir, 14 of the city’s finest authors explore the dark heart of the Pearl of the Orient in haunting stories of depravity and despair.

New York, 2061: The place called the Pleasure Academy is a living nightmare where abducted girls are trapped, trained for a life of abject service while their souls are slowly but surely destroyed. Dorian, a thirteen-year-old runaway who’d been imprisoned there, might never have made it out if not for her fellow inmate Mina, who’d hatched the escape plan. Mina was the more daring of the two—but they’d been equally desperate.

The police are desperate for information on the triple homicide. Detective Joona Linna enlists the help of hypnotist Erik Maria Bark. But when Bark unlocks the secrets in the boy’s memory, he triggers a terrifying chain of events that will put all their lives in jeopardy.

Philip Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.

1955. Two young couples move to the uninhabited, isolated fjord of Hedinsfjörður. Then one of the women meets her death in mysterious circumstances. The case is never solved. Fifty years later an old photograph comes to light, and it becomes clear that the couples may not have been alone on the fjord after all. In nearby Siglufjörður, young policeman Ari Thór tries to piece together what really happened that fateful night, in a town where no one wants to know, where secrets are a way of life. Things take a sinister turn when a child goes missing in broad daylight.

In this stunning and provocative domestic drama about a sweet 16 birthday party that goes horribly awry, a wealthy family in San Francisco finds their picture-perfect life unraveling, their darkest secrets revealed, and their friends turned to enemies.

After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now, more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead.

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam, and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

Everyone says the Elders family are nothing but cheats, thieves, and convicts - a fact 19-year-old Jamie Elders has been trying desperately to escape. She may have the natural talent of a poker savant, but her dreams of going pro and getting the hell out of the tiny town of Blind River, New York, are going nowhere fast - especially when she lands in a huge pile of debt to her uncle Loyal. At Loyal's beck and call until her debt is repaid, Jamie can't easily walk away - not with her younger brother Toby left at his mercy.

North Yorkshire, England. Detective Chief Inspector Harry Grimm is reluctantly easing into life in the dales. As he gradually acclimatizes to the slower pace of the countryside while he awaits a return to the city, he’s called out to inspect a farmer’s crushed body. And despite the doctor on site declaring it a tragic mishap, the seasoned police officer rolls up his sleeves when evidence points to foul play. With a mysterious clue the only connection and the not-so-quiet village in self-imposed lockdown, the city-bred cop hunts for a link lethal enough to lead to murder.

Votre fille de 17 ans part de bon matin pour son petit boulot d'été. Elle vous promet d'être de retour pour le dîner. Mais elle ne rentrera pas. Ni ce soir-là, ni les suivants. Votre pire cauchemar a commencé... Pour Tim Blake, le père de Sydney, une seule mission : la retrouver à tout prix. Un coup de fil mystérieux, des individus menaçants, des meurtres... et la vie sans histoire de Tim bascule dans un engrenage incompréhensible et totalement terrifiant. Pourtant, galvanisé par son amour paternel, il ira jusqu'au bout, au risque de tout perdre...

FBI agent Rachel Walling finally gets the call she's dreaded for years, the one that tells her the Poet has surfaced. She has never forgotten the serial killer who wove lines of poetry in his hideous crimes - and apparently he has not forgotten her. Former LAPD detective Harry Bosch gets a call, too - from the widow of an old friend. Her husband's death seems natural, but his ties to the hunt for the Poet make Bosch dig deep.

Cherry, Nebraska, population 312, is just off the highway between the sticks and the boonies. It’s where Dave Rhodes and his friends have lived all their lives. They own businesses, raise families, pay taxes, deal with odd neighbors, and, once or twice a month - just like their fathers before them - transform into wolves.

Florida private eye Doak Miller agreed to help the local cops by posing as a hit man to catch a woman looking to get rid of her husband. But then he met the wife - and fell, hard. Now he's plotting with her to commit a murder that could net them millions of dollars and the chance to be together. But to pull it off under the watchful eyes of the police, it'll have to be the perfect crime....

A young hospital security guard with a disturbingly unique taste in women. A maternity doctor with a horrifically unusual appetite. When the two of them meet, they embark on a journey of self-discovery while shattering societal norms and engaging in destructively aberrant behavior. As they unwittingly help each other understand a world in which neither seems to belong, they begin to realize what it truly means to be alive...and that it might not always a good thing.

The island city-state of Singapore harbors unique customs and traditions largely unknown to the West. A booming economy and embrace of conformity overshadow its gambling dens, red-light districts, and a collective passion for ghostly and gory tales. Now, in Singapore Noir, some of its best contemporary authors delve into its seedy side.

Still reeling from a brutal dismemberment, detective Kline is forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside a religious cult that takes literally the New Testament idea that you should cut off your hand if it offends you. Armed only with his gun, his wits, and a gift for self-preservation, Kline must navigate a gauntlet of lies, threats, and misinformation. All too soon he discovers that the stakes are higher than he thought and that his survival depends on an act of sheer will.

When Angela met Jason Powell while catering a dinner party in East Hampton, she assumed their romance would be a short-lived fling, like so many relationships between locals and summer visitors. To her surprise, Jason, a brilliant economics professor at NYU, had other plans, and they married the following summer. For Angela, the marriage turned out to be a chance to reboot her life. She and her son were finally able to move out of her mother's home to Manhattan, where no one knew about her tragic past.

Paul Edgecombe, ancien gardien-chef d'un pénitencier dans les années 1930, entreprend d'écrire ses mémoires. Il revient sur l'affaire John Caffey - ce grand Noir au regard absent, condamné à mort pour le viol et le meurtre de deux fillettes - qui défraya la chronique en 1932. "La Ligne verte" décrit un univers étouffant et brutal, où la défiance est la règle. Personne ne sort indemne de ce bâtiment coupé du monde, où cohabitent une étrange souris apprivoisée par un Cajun pyromane, le sadique Percy Wetmore, et Caffey, prisonnier sans problème.