Dark Crime Fiction

Written in reaction to what Bentley perceived as the sterility and artificiality of the detective fiction of his day, Trent's Last Case features Philip Trent, an all-too-human detective who not only falls in love with the chief suspect but reaches a brilliant conclusion that is totally wrong. Trent's Last Case begins when millionaire American financier Sigsbee Manderson is murdered while on holiday in England. A London newspaper sends Trent to investigate, and he is soon matching wits with Scotland Yard's Inspector Murth.

When a senior Edinburgh civil servant spectacularly takes his own life in Kinloch harbour, DCI Jim Daley comes face to face with the murky world of politics. To add to his woes, two local drug dealers lie dead, ritually assassinated. It's clear that dark forces are at work in the town. With his boss under investigation, his marriage hanging on by a thread, and his sidekick, DS Scott, wrestling with his own demons, Daley's world is in meltdown.

The past comes back to haunt a small town when one murder leads to the discovery of another. When a troubled young woman, Jenn Berman, goes missing at the summer fair in Hamby, her uncaring family fails to notice. That is, until a loose dog returns home with a bloodied hand. Investigators are led to a developing subdivision where they find the unthinkable: Jenn's body in a shallow grave.

This was supposed to be my last hush money payment to a dirty cop for a crime I didn't commit. I've been tethered to danger since I was a little girl because of my last name. Of course, when I see the light at the end of the tunnel, it's stripped from me… by him, a ruthless up-and-coming mob boss with no business being this hot. Donny's the guy they call to kill the hitmen. And now he's trapped me for the rest of my days. I scheme and plan and try to escape, but he's always one step ahead of me. He's been hunting prey since I've been hiding from mobsters.

Emily Porter saw me kill a man who betrayed my family, and she helped put me behind bars. But someone with my connections doesn't stay in prison long, and she is about to learn the hard way that there is a price to pay for crossing the boss of the King dynasty. A very, very painful price.... She's going to cry for me as I blister that beautiful bottom, then she's going to scream for me as I ravage her over and over again, taking her in the most shameful ways she can imagine. But leaving her well-punished and well-used is just the beginning of what I have in store for Emily.

Dermot McEvoy sweeps his listeners into the midst of one of the most heated political races in New York City history, where an unlikely player decides to make her presence known. First it hits the papers that the Virgin Mary has appeared to Jackie Swift, an affable G.O.P. congressman with a couple of nasty habits. She then appears in a dream to Wolfe Tone O'Rourke, a liberal political consultant who is still haunted by the ghost of Bobby Kennedy, whose death he feels responsible for.

DCI Harry Grimm smells trouble brewing. As the chief inspector and his team prepare for a harsh winter storm, a call comes in from an old pal that a remote PI training session in the Dales he is attending has abruptly ended in a suspicious death. And while the gruff detective struggles through a blizzard to reach the crime scene, the residents of a nearby house come to a fatal end.

There is no turning back.... Detective John Morrigan arrives at what appears to be a routine homicide in a botched armed robbery. However, as a key witness to the murder is herself violently killed less than 24 hours later, Morrigan discovers that someone very dangerous is responsible. As the Detective follows the trail, it leads him into a tangled web of duplicity stretching from the heart of his police department all the way to the upper echelons of political power.

It’s been seven years since Gloomy Knob landed in the Ted Stevens High-Security Federal Penitentiary and five years since the end of the war, the one North Korea started when they sent a missile to Cold Storage, Alaska. Serving a life sentence for the murder of his sister, Gloomy spends his time trying to forget about the past. Then one day, Gloomy is snatched from his off-site work station. Instead of celebrating his newfound freedom, Gloomy comes unmoored - he feels he belongs in prison. But his kidnappers believe Gloomy knows where a second nuclear warhead is hidden.

In modern-day America, Dez is a former lawyer and teacher - an ephebophile with a proclivity for teenage girls hiding out in a trailer park with his latest conquest, Chloe.

Having been in and out of courtrooms (and therapists' offices) for a number of years, Dez is adrift, at odds with a society that persecutes him over his desires. From his couch one afternoon, Dez watches an interview with Jasper Ulrickson, a doting father and loving husband whose heartrending memoir, Lessons from My Daughter, has become a national best seller.

Don't you trust me? I mean, look at me. Blond, blue eyed, the very image of innocence. Pretty enough, if you care about that kind of thing. I don't. But would a normal person switch identities with some wet mess of a girl at the airport just to get her to stop bawling about being separated from her loser boyfriend and sent to live with some distant relatives? Nope, she wouldn't. Yet I did. I'm not as normal as you think. And you'll just have to trust me.

Jake Cantrell tried to put his past behind him and settle down after suffering an unjust disgrace as an army officer. He works as a campus security officer at a small college in upstate New York. But things aren’t so placid in his leafy new environs. A mass opioid crisis threatens to devastate the campus. When two football players on the new drug attack Jake with bats, Jake is fired for the excessive force he has to use to subdue them. Newly unemployed, Jake is retained to find missing college student Deborah Chapman, a gifted young jazz vocalist who has performed at Carnegie Hall.

The lead homicide investigator in a rural town, Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock is deeply unnerved when a high school classmate is found strangled, her body floating in a lake. And not just any classmate, but Rosalind Ryan, whose beauty and inscrutability exerted a magnetic pull on Smithson High School, first during Rosalind's student years and then again when she returned to teach drama. As much as Rosalind's life was a mystery to Gemma when they were students together, her death presents even more of a puzzle.

Summer 1989: Gunther Fahnstiel, once a tough cop who wasn't averse to taking a little side money from a certain madam, has just escaped the dementia ward of his Wichita nursing home. He's not exactly sure where he wants to go, but wherever it is, it has to do with the bag full of cash belonging to the man he accidentally backed over with his RV in 1979. During his search, Gunther begins to relive the violent fallout of that madam's sex lottery 40 years ago. As Gunther's memories unravel, his past and present will collide in a devastating reckoning.

It's week one of the Swedish elk hunt, and the sound of gunfire is everywhere. When Tuva Moodyson investigates the story that could make her career she stumbles on a web of secrets that knit Gavrik town together. Are the latest murders connected to the Medusa killings 20 years ago? Is someone following her? Why take the eyes? Tuva must face her demons and venture deep into the woods to stop the killer and write the story. And then get the hell out of Gavrik.

The Chosen have been warned. Powerful psychics across the globe have gotten the same eerie and insistent message: Go to Prosperity. Because in this small North Carolina mountain town, madness has taken hold... Trapped in a nightmare they can't escape, the residents of Prosperity are killing one another, waking up with no memory of the monstrous acts they've committed - or the reasons why. Chief Deputy Katie Cole knows that whatever evil is afoot is beyond her expertise, and beyond the understanding of Sheriff Jackson Archer. They need help.

A troubled war hero. A criminal mastermind. And the meeting of two fatal enemies....

The crime fiction canopy's a broad one, with room to give shelter to writing of all sorts, as editor Lawrence Block shows with At Home in the Dark.

Fifteen years ago, 29 Barley Street, South London, became notorious as the scene of alleged poltergeist activity which led to the death of young Holly Wasson. The shadow cast by this episode is still felt in the town and amongst the gang of friends who were caught up in the tragic event. When one of the group dies in horrific and strange circumstances, Matt Hunter, former minister and now professor of sociology, is called in to investigate.

Things have gone from bad to worse for T.J. Peterson. The cops have kicked him off the force, his girlfriend called it quits, his best friend and former partner won't speak to him, and his estranged 20-year-old daughter, Katy, continues to torment him with photos of the hellholes she is living in. Add in a shrink's diagnosis of PTSD, and Peterson is barely holding it together. When he receives an anonymous text message with an online link to a video of a young journalist being tortured, Peterson does the only thing he knows how to do - he sets out to save her.