Dark Crime Fiction

Detective Madison Knight thought a midnight drive through the countryside would help clear her mind, but she thought wrong. Her car runs out of gas, stranding her in the middle of nowhere in pitch darkness. When she gets out to stretch her legs, the beam of her phone’s flashlight lands on a suitcase in the ditch. After she opens it, she’s sorry she did.

Influenced by Vonnegut, Jose Saramago, David Foster Wallace, Will Ferguson, Lynn Coady, and the Coen Brothers, Buddy Roy Baldry inhabits the wildlands of Canada, where he writes darkly humorous novels about the everyday human neurosis of ordinary people in extraordinary situations.

It's a bad time for unfinished business to come back and haunt him, forcing Daniel Faust to confront his tortured history and the family he left behind. It's an even worse time for his surviving foes to join forces and take deadly aim at Faust's throne. Toss in a syndicate operative from a parallel world, a deranged, half-demon assassin hungry for a duel, and the shadowy machinations of the King of Worms, and the stage is set for a showdown under the neon lights of Vegas.

Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.

The reviews called it "A Play to Die For" after the woman was found dead in the front row. It didn't seem so funny the next night, when another body was found - this time the playwright's, his throat slashed.

Detective Kathy Mallory takes over, but no matter what she asks, no one seems to be giving her a straight answer. The only person - if "person" is the right word - who seems to be clear is the ghostwriter. Every night, an unseen backstage hand chalks up line changes and messages on a blackboard. And the ghostwriter is now writing Mallory into the play itself, a play about a long-ago massacre that may not be at all fictional.

A wave of apparent suicides hits a string of seaside resorts, but when a police officer is named as the latest to die, DI Amy Winter suspects there may be more than mere coincidence to these tragic deaths. But what dark motive could cause someone to throw themselves into the cold depths of the North Sea? Someone in the community knows more, but Amy’s questions are met with resistance. A group of mysterious teenagers might hold the key, but why are they so afraid to talk? Meanwhile, after the release from prison of her serial killer mother, Amy is fighting her own demons.

After years of abandonment, Raven Hall has been restored to its former glory. For one night only, it is playing host to an evening of murder mystery. The guests have gathered. The roles have been cast. But someone is playing a sinister game, one with devastating consequences. And as the guests are about to discover, the truth is much darker than fiction.

Professor Hans Rekke is a world authority on interrogation techniques, capable of dizzying feats of logic and observation. He was born into wealth and power and has a picture-perfect wife and daughter. But he also has a fragile psyche that falls apart under pressure. Micaela Vargas is a street-smart police officer, the daughter of Chilean political refugees, who grew up in the projects on the outskirts of Stockholm and has two brothers on the wrong side of the law. She is tenacious and uncompromising, and desperate to prove herself to her fellow cops.

In a deserted tenement in an occupied city, two dead bodies lie on a dusty floor as if they have fallen out of the air. One corpse is cut in half, the other is utterly unmarked. One is human, the other isn’t. The city of Ambergris is half ruined, rotten, its population controlled by narcotics, internment camps, and acts of terror. But its new masters want this case closed, urgently. Detective John Finch has just one week to solve it or be sent to the camps. With no ID for the victims, no clues, no leads, and precious little hope, Finch’s fate hangs in the balance.

This collection contains Book 1 - Undercurrents, Book 2 – Drowned Voices, and Book 3 – Emergence.

Sam and Haley Quaid buried their 10-year-old son and then ended their marriage, all in one week. It wasn’t a volatile divorce, but three years later, except for trading Christmas cards, Sam and Haley have completely lost touch...until a dramatic weather report sets their paths on a collision course once more. Tropical Storm Gladys is heading straight toward coastal Texas, and locals are anxious as they prepare for potential devastation. Haley, a realtor, has an appointment to show a property and is determined to keep it, but a hurricane isn’t the only looming danger.

Actor Nora Blake finds her dream job when she is cast in a murder-mystery troupe that performs in an imposing but captivating old castle. When she stumbles upon a real murder, things take a nightmarish turn in this first book in an exciting new series.

Thirteen-year-old Stacy is sunbathing in the backyard when she hears a strange noise from inside the house. Turning to look, she sees a man with a gun burst through the door; then everything goes black. She wakes up in a hospital bed to learn that she has spent the last four years in a catatonic state. Suddenly 17, she finds herself struggling to adjust and fighting to remember what happened to her. She is the only witness to the shooting that injured her and killed her mother.

Jacob Reese enjoys the quiet life, running a coffee shop and renting out his cottage in The Hollows, Vermont. But the calm is shattered when a woman who looks eerily similar to his ex-girlfriend Laura turns up to stay in the cottage, and leaves a mysterious note in the guest book. Now Jacob’s seeing Laura everywhere - a glimpse of her face across the street, her music box left outside his house, a gift he gave her years before hanging from the trees. But it can’t be Laura. Because Laura’s dead.

After receiving an unexpected gift following her college graduation, aspiring journalist Adele Plank returns to the Pacific Northwest’s beautiful and isolated sea and shores landscape of the San Juan Islands, where she soon finds herself immersed in the shocking mystery of a young woman’s brutal murder. The deathly discovery rocks the island community, stirring doubts about their new sheriff and turning old friends into new rivals. Adele must determine who she can trust and who she cannot, even as a mysterious stranger provides her a critical clue.

A man with dark thoughts on his mind is racing along the remote snowy roads of Hurmevaara in Finland when there is flash in the sky and something crashes into the car. That something turns about to be a highly valuable meteorite. With euro signs lighting up the eyes of the locals, the unexpected treasure is temporarily placed in a neighbourhood museum, under the watchful eye of a priest named Joel.

Nada Alic's women—the perverts, nobodies, reality TV stars, poetic hopefuls, shameless party girls, and self-help addicts of Los Angeles and its environs—are all wrestling with a shared stark reality: the modern world. To cope, they live in their baddest thoughts: the lush, strange landscape of female make-believe.

From Blake Pierce, best-selling author of Once Gone (a number-one best seller with over 600 five-star reviews), comes a heart-pounding new mystery series. A bundle of books: Book one (Before He Kills) and book two (Before He Sees) in Blake Pierce’s Mackenzie White mystery series....

L'affaire paraissait pourtant simple. Wade Barsad, un homme au passé trouble, a enfermé les chevaux de sa femme Mary dans une grange avant d'y mettre le feu. En retour, celle-ci lui a tiré six balles dans la tête durant son sommeil. Telle est du moins la version officielle. Mais le shérif Walt Longmire ne croit pas à la confession de Mary. Persuadé de son innocence, Walt décide de se rendre sur les lieux du crime.

An explosion rips through New York City's Grand Central Station one morning, destroying the train Karen Friedman's husband, a successful hedge-fund manager, is riding in to work. On that same day, a suspicious hit-and-run accident leaves a young man dead in Karen's hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut. Ty Hauck, a detective, becomes emotionally caught up in the case and finds a clue that shockingly connects the two seemingly unrelated events.