Humor Crime

Existential noir meets absurd comedy when a young man reluctantly enlists as source material for an art project. Stanley had known it was a mistake to accept his uncle Lech's offer to apartment-sit in Prague - he'd known it was one of Lech's proposals, a thinly veiled setup for some invasive, potentially dangerous performance art project. But whatever Lech had planned for Stanley, it would get him to Prague and maybe offer a chance to make things right with T after his failed attempt to propose.

Excuse me if I'm feeling sentimental. I might die tonight. My name is Candy Tran. Before I was hunting down serial killers and feeding men to alligators, I was a normal, church-going, tax-paying citizen. Before all of this. I've been given a chance to tell my story, so please, listen closely. This is going to take a while.

Charlie Deavon is a British author who meets a fan (the sexually troublesome Amelia Heart) in a pub. The following morning she is found dead. The main suspect in the case is Simon, Charlie's agent. Having avoided the police, Charlie, Simon, and the local bartender try to solve the case together. The three men, what with the stress of it all, turn to a new drug called Merlin, which allows them to control and share hallucinations. From then on, they trip and hallucinate their way through to the story's conclusion.

Bryan LeBlanc worked his way up into a plum position on Wall Street as the boy genius of the foreign exchange desk. Surrounded by "the few, the proud, the completely full of themselves", he decides to give Wall Street a taste of its own medicine and hatches an intricate plan to disappear permanently with just enough misappropriated money - and sailing classes - to spend his golden years cruising the Caribbean. Bryan quickly learns that being a criminal, even a really smart one, is more complicated than he thought. He finds himself on the run in the Cayman Islands, wanted for murder.

Criminal defense investigator Cecil Younger spends his days coaching would-be felons on how to avoid incriminating themselves. When Sherrie, a returning client with a good heart but a penchant for bad boys, asks him to track down some evidence that will help with her case, Cecil agrees. Cecil treks out to the shady apartment complex she mentioned, only to find his teenage daughter, Blossom, inside. He manages to get both the box Sherrie wanted and his daughter safely home, and later discovers the "evidence" is a large pile of cash - fifty thousand dollars, to be exact.

As a private investigator, Kathleen Stone relies on her ability to blend into the background. Aided by her street-smart drag queen friend and the best wigmaker in New York City, she feels confident that her camouflage is up to snuff. But when a cheating spouse she's been trailing endsup dead under suspicious circumstances, she fears that someone she angered in her past job - busting gangs and drug dealers as an undercover cop - has seen through her disguises.

Cameron Smith attends an elite boarding school and has just been accepted to Princeton University alongside his beautiful girlfriend, Claire. Life for Cameron would be perfect, except that Cameron Smith is actually Skip O'Rourke, and Skip O'Rourke ran away from his grifter family four years ago...along with $100,000 of their "earnings" (because starting a new life is not cheap). But when his uncle Wonderful tracks him down, Skip's given an ultimatum: Come back to the family for one last con, or say good-bye to life as Cameron.

Determined to thwart her parents' plans to marry her off into Asian suburbia, Fiona seeks her freedom at any price. How far will she go to bury the Hello Kitty stereotype forever? Fiona's journey of self-discovery is biting and clever as she embraces her true nature and creates her own version of the American Dream, eliminating - without fear or remorse - anyone who stands in her way.

They say your life flashes before your eyes right before you die. Finnick Hollins might be finding that out the hard way. With a gun pointed at the back of his head, he retraces his life starting as a child running cons with his father and ending in a stranger's house with a dead body at his feet and the chilling feel of cold steel pressed to his skull.

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.

Samantha Leiffer has a self-centered self-help guru for a mother, a cadre of off-kilter Greenwich Village pals, and an ambisexually-cheating ex-boyfriend. She doesn't need more grief. Then she spies two people dumping a dubious-looking ice chest into the Hudson River, and she has a chilling hunch about what's inside. Not being the kind of girl to let two psychos get away with murder, Sam sets out to unravel a mystery - and is soon being stalked by a sinister, shadowy figure who's wearing one-of-a-kind mirrored contact lenses.

George and Lou used to be thugs for hire. Now they're living in a shack in Costa Rica, hiding from the crime lord who wants them dead. Their last job, to deliver him a werewolf in a cage, went...badly. But they can't hide out forever, and when they're finally captured, it seems as if George and Lou's ultimate fate will involve being doused in gasoline and set aflame. Instead, they're given a second chance. There's another werewolf out there. This time, it's Ally, a 14-year-old girl.

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.

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.

Farnsworth and Diego are back, leading the newly appointed Division of Nerd Crime into the black heart of the regional Renaissance Festival where someone has stolen celebrity D&D gamer Vin Diesel’s identity.

From Benjamin Franklin's newspaper hoax that faked the death of his rival to Abbie Hoffman's attempt to levitate the Pentagon - pranksters, hoaxers, and con artists have caused confusion, disorder, and laughter in Western society for centuries. Profiling the most notorious mischief-makers from the 1600s to the present day, Pranksters explores how "pranks" are part of a long tradition of speaking truth to power and social critique.

Kann es beim Bestatter zu viele Leichen geben? Wie bringt man einen Finnen dazu, mehr als drei Worte zu sagen? Ist man in einem Pyjama im Supermarkt underdressed oder kommt es auf die Accessoires an? Alles Fragen, die Maggie Abendroth nicht beantworten will. Sie hat definitiv andere Sorgen. Maggie ist 37, pleite und wohnt wieder in ihrer alten Heimat Bochum auf 22 qm - ohne Aussicht. Ihr neuer Job als Aushilfssekretärin bei einem Beerdigungsinstitut stellt ihre Nerven zusätzlich auf eine harte Probe.

Internationally best-selling author Tim Dorsey's irreverent and hilarious novels starring evil genius Serge A. Storms, lovable psychiatric hospital escapee, zoom along at breakneck speed, delivering laughs and shocks in droves.

The Edgar-nominated author of Gun Monkeys is back with a thrill-a-minute suspense novel that mixes crime and academia - with hilarious results. Here Victor Gischler draws us into a wild and wicked world, where tenured professors are busy burying bodies, cash-up-front P.I.’s hunt for missing coeds and one desperate street-tough has to decide which he’d rather be: a live poet or a dead criminal.