Crime Noir

It's Christmas Eve, 1988 and Russell and Joe are among the guests at a lavish party in a celebrity mansion in the heart of Soho. Television presenter and national treasure, Nathan Bentley has a formidable reputation for legendary parties—with wall-to-wall celebrities, drink flowing, drugs, dancing, ill-tempered Cordon-Bleu chefs laying on the food and world famous musicians providing the entertainment. What could be better for a bunch of waifs and strays on Christmas Eve?

It's 1986, and Adam Cave, lead singer of the pop sensation Loose Lips, is struggling to stay in the closet, especially as his group is going through a messy split, and media speculation about the reasons behind the break up are high. Joe Stone has been assigned to Adam as a runner for the behind-the-scenes, warts and all expose of the recording of the band's last album, and an unlikely friendship begins to form.

It's 1987, and Soho is in the grip of another hot summer. While working part-time in The Red Lion, Joe finds himself agreeing to help a notorious gangster search for her missing girlfriend. Antonia The Gecko Lagorio is daughter to the ruthless but ageing gang boss, Tony The Lizard Lagorio. When her girlfriend, Charlotte Fenwick, goes missing, Antonia turns to Joe for help, believing her to have been kidnapped by a rival gang.

It's 1985, and Joe Stone is excited to be joining his old school friend, and lifelong crush, Chris, for a long weekend in London's Soho—home to a vibrant, developing gay scene, and a million miles from the small town where Joe and Chris grew up. When Chris is found brutally murdered, the police write his death off as just another rent boy fallen foul of a bad hook up. But Joe knows his friend was killed deliberately, and joins forces with former police detective, Russell Dixon—Chris's flatmate—to find out why.

When fifteen-year-old Oscar Dreyer-Hoff disappears in this “masterpiece” (Booklist, starred review), the police assume he’s simply a runaway—a typically overlooked middle child doing what teenagers do all around the world. But his frantic family is certain that something terrible has happened. After all, what runaway would leave behind a note that reads:

Written years before Jordan Harper’s breakout success, Everybody Knows, this stirring and brutal bildungsroman tells the story of young Luke Crosswhite, who after years apart from his criminal family returns to their flock deep in the California desert. Luke’s father is serving time for a brutal murder that Luke himself witnessed; now, his uncle vies for power and rival biker gangs encroach on the family’s various criminal enterprises.

On the day Stockholm police officer Hanna Ahlander’s personal and professional lives crash, she takes refuge at her sister’s lodge in the Swedish ski resort paradise of Åre. But it’s a brief comfort. The entire village is shaken by the sudden vanishing of a local teenage girl. Hanna can’t help but investigate, and while searching for the missing person, she lands a job with the local police department. There she joins forces with Detective Inspector Daniel Lindskog, who has been tasked with finding the girl. Their only lead: a scarf in the snow.

Harvard dropout and ex-Special Forces operative Joe Brody is climbing the ranks in the criminal underworld. After successfully executing multiple missions for the various crime syndicates that run New York City, he has come to earn the trust and respect of the city's most dangerous denizens. Which is why his newest task—retrieving a pet pigeon snatched from a rooftop coop in Brooklyn—has Joe puzzled . . . until he learns that the bird is valued at close to a million dollars.

For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can't refuse.The 200-year-old godfather of the Budayeen's underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.

When McGee picks up the phone and hears a voice from the past, he can't help it. He has to meddle. Especially when he has the chance to reunite Sam Taggart, a reckless, restless man like himself, with the woman who's still waiting for him. But what begins as a simple matchmaking scheme soon becomes a bloody chase that takes McGee to Mexico, a beautiful country - and one from which he hopes to return alive.

Witnessed by a throng of gaping spectators, a charismatic Marine sergeant is murdered under a Bangkok bridge inside a bolted-shut Mercedes Benz. Among the witnesses are the only two cops in the city not on the take, but within moments one is murdered and his partner, Sonchai Jitpleecheep - a devout Buddhist and the son of a Thai bar girl and a long-gone Vietnam War G.I. - is hell-bent on wreaking revenge. On a vigilante mission to capture his partner’s murderer, Sonchai is begrudgingly paired with a beautiful FBI agent named Jones....

Smoke Kings is a powerful and propulsive novel with a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters. Like Steph Cha's Your House Will Pay it explores decades of racial tensions through a fictional landscape where the line between justice and revenge is blurred.

Ace, a young card shark, has worked her entire life to achieve one goal. Bring Burlone Allegretti to his knees. As the head of a mafia family who dabbles in human trafficking, he’s far from innocent and Ace can't wait to exact her revenge. As her plan is set in motion, the alluring head of a rival family, Kingston Romano, approaches her with a proposition. One that she’s desperate enough to accept. Soon, she finds herself in the crosshairs of a war she isn’t prepared to fight.

Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash. The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle

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.

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.

None of us ever agreed on the exact beginning. Was it when we started drawing the chalk figures, or when they started to appear on their own? Was it the terrible accident? Or when they found the first body?

La France de 1834 est une poudrière. Sourde à la colère du peuple, la monarchie réprime de plus en plus durement les émeutes qui gagnent le pays. À Paris, au milieu de la nuit du 14 avril, l'armée abat les habitants d'un immeuble situé au 12 de la rue Transnonain. Un repaire d'insurgés ? Les victimes sont pourtant des vieillards, des femmes, des enfants… Une paire de bas gît au fond d'un des lits taché de sang ; ils appartiennent à une fille des rues portée disparue. Elle sait. Le préfet de police lance l'agent Joseph Lutz sur sa trace.

Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.

When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain. From the author of The Maltese Falcon.