Dark Humor Mystery

One Christmas Eve, Whale Harbor is visited by a man who thinks he's Jesus and claims to be looking for a game of poker. But, as usual, things are not quite what they seem. Having some version of the Lord in town for his birthday creates a strange effect on the locals.

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.

Twin Peaks meets Pretty Little Liars in acclaimed author Maggie Thrash's new Strange Truth series. It's better to know the truth. At least sometimes. Halfway through Friday night's football game, beautiful cheerleader Brittany Montague - dressed as the giant Winship Wildcat mascot - hurls herself off a bridge into Atlanta's surging Chattahoochee River. Just like that, she's gone. Eight days later, Benny Flax and Virginia Leeds will be the only ones who know why.

Kate and Michael, twenty-something housemates working at the same Trader Joe’s supermarket, are thoroughly screwed when people start turning into zombies at their house party in the Oakland hills. The zombie plague is a sexually transmitted disease, turning its victims into shambling, horny, voracious killers.

When the Vatican's top assassin, a Rhodesian merc, a pair of serial killer lovers, a dirty cop, and a professional sadist compete in a mad race for a pair of priceless magical artifacts, betrayal, theft, and murder are just the opening moves in a game of death.

Midnight Rider Productions is a dark-web nightmare machine, headed by the one man who years ago drove Darby to hide in the seamy environs of Old Town and make his life there. But Darby left his own mark back in the day, and the shadowy head of production has a grudge to settle. Rider has found him at long last and plans to make an example of him.

Time is up in Old Town. As the pace of gentrification reaches frenzy in Portland, Oregon, Darby Holland’s beloved tattoo parlor, Lucky Supreme, is destroyed by a bomb that ripped through an entire city block. Only a warning call from his favorite prostitute saved his life. Developers have been like wolves at the door of Dmitri (the drunken landlord) for the past few years, but this is different.

The night world of Old Town, Portland, Oregon, has gone mad in the grip of gentrification, and at the center of it all is Lucky Supreme, a seedy tattoo parlor, whose proprietor is a street-bred artist with a unique approach to problem solving. Darby Holland has enough on his radar, but when some flash (tattoo artwork) stolen from him resurfaces in California, he can't help himself. His efforts to reclaim it set him on a dangerous path, dragging along his delightfully eccentric colleagues.

Meet Jack Jordan. He’s a smooth-talking con artist with a penchant for the fast life. He’s snuck into Lufkin, Texas, in the dead of night with little more than a beat-up Honda, a hollowed-out King James Bible full of cocaine, and enough emotional baggage to sink a steamship. He’s charming, dedicated, and extremely paranoid.

When eighteen-year-old Ellie Canning is discovered wandering the countryside, dazed and traumatized, she tells a harrowing story of abduction, captivity, and escape. An overnight symbol of survival and empowerment, Ellie enthralls an outraged nation. Then authorities zero in on an unlikely suspect: high school teacher Suzannah Wells, identified by Ellie as the woman who kept her drugged and bound in a basement. The evidence against Suzannah is damning—vilified by the media, Suzannah’s only defense is that not a single word Ellie says is true. Suzannah has no reason to lie.

In the court of the “King”, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable and part narco-lit romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.

On November 9, 1989, Bernd Zeiger, a Stasi officer in the twilight of his career, is deteriorating from a mysterious illness. Alarmed by the disappearance of Lara, a young waitress at his regular café with whom he is obsessed, he chases a series of clues throughout Berlin. The details of Lara’s vanishing trigger flashbacks to his entanglement with Johannes Held, a physicist who, 25 years earlier, infiltrated an American research institute dedicated to weaponizing the paranormal.

Henry, a New Yorker left destitute by circumstance and obsession, is plucked from vagrancy by a shadowy outfit whose primary business is arranging for staged murders of anxiety-ridden clients unhinged by the “events downtown” and seeking to experience - and live through - their own carefully executed assassinations. When Henry joins this nefarious crew, which includes a beautiful blonde tattooist named Tulip, contortionist twins, and a woman referred to only as “the knockout”, he becomes inextricably linked to its ringleader, the mysterious herring connoisseur Mr. Kindt.

It’s 1997 at the dawn of the digital age in San Francisco. Ex-journalist and struggling alcoholic David “Itchy” Crane’s fledgling “information consultancy” business is getting slowly buried by bad luck, bad decisions, and the growing presence of the Internet. Before he can completely self-destruct, a private investigator offers him 50 grand to find a missing girl named Ashley. Crane takes the job because the money’s right and because the only clue to her disappearance is a dead-on oil portrait of Crane himself - painted by the mysterious missing girl he has never met.

Just days after Josie is the last-minute bridesmaid at a massive Boston Brahmin wedding, the lovely bride dies on her honeymoon at an exclusive Arizona resort. The mother of the bride thinks Josie, with her... unique people skills, can find out what really happened. Josie discovers the dead bride may not have been the first dead girl. And to Josie's horror, the killer has set his sights on her next.

Meet Rowena Halley, a former human rights activist turned academic. Rowena thought teaching on US college campuses would be a lot safer than interviewing torture victims in Russia. Boy, was she wrong. Rowena quickly gets caught up in campus intrigue that threatens to turn deadly. Meanwhile, the life and lover she thought she’d left behind in Moscow might not be so firmly back in the past as she’d believed.

If stealing a half million dollars from the Mafia is a bad idea, then using the money to pay off a homicidal Russian loan shark is an insane idea. Elliot Becker realizes this a little too late as his well-intentioned South Florida real estate scam starts to fall to pieces. He needs a Plan B - and he needs it now - because when Ponzi schemes fail, they tend to fail fast. Complicating matters is Logan Treverrow, an aspiring sculptor and newly-returned veteran from Afghanistan trying to figure out who took out a $200,000 loan in his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s name.

Whitt hat kein Bock zu sterben. Vor allem nicht mehrmals. Doch genau das erwartet ihn beim "Immortal Contest": dort soll er sich an seinem unsterblichen Tag live umbringen lassen. Auch wenn er am Tag der Show über Superkräfte verfügt - sein Leben würde er trotzdem nicht aufs Spiel setzen. Aber Whitt hat keine Wahl: Dem Sieger des Immortal Contests winken eine Million Dollar Preisgeld, weshalb sein Bruder ihn an die Show verkauft hat - und es ist nicht so einfach, sich gegen eine Entführung zu wehren, wenn man im Rollstuhl sitzt.

Ivan Sorokin is missing. Who wants him out of the picture - his wife, his business partner, or the stripper who holds his heart? Josie Tucker stands on Beach Street with her back to the San Francisco wharf. Above her, the Ghirardelli sign winks in the dusky twilight, seducing her. The ice cream parlor lights beckon like a lactose lothario, a casein casanova, trying hard to woo her. But her heart longs for dumplings, for dim sum.

When snarky food critic, Josie Tucker, heads to Austin, Texas, to wax philosophical about the local barbecue joints, she stumbles on to a decades' old missing person case. With the help of a local reporter, a Goth ghost hunter, and a bunco-playing transvestite, she tries to unravel the heart-tugging, hidden history before the whole place goes up in smoke.