Noir City

It is an obsession that has haunted Nick Malick for seven years - to avenge the murder of his young son. In his gut Malick knows who did it. But the psychopath is in prison for another crime, scheduled to be released in a year. All Malick has to do is wait...and survive.

Stockholm, 1794: A young nobleman, Eric Three Roses, languishes in a hospital as the rest of the city claims that he belongs in a madhouse. Riddled with guilt, he writes down the memories of his lost love—his beautiful wife who died on their wedding night. The young woman’s mother also mourns her death and, desperate for justice, begs for help from the only person who will listen to her: Jean Mickel Cardell, the one-armed watchman. But she isn’t the only person seeking him out.

Nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Award, City on Fire returns to the world-city of Metropolitan, a city dominated by plasm, the magical substance capable of both creation and destruction. With her help, Aiah's lover Constantine has established himself in the metropolis of Caraqui, a nation dominated by corrupt officials, gangsters, and the genetically altered known as the "twisted." Here they hope to create a revolution in the cosmic order - but first they must fend off treachery, war, and the threat of Taikoen, a deadly creature that lives within plasm itself....

This book does fall into the same universe as my other series of books I call the Noir series. In those books you can hear about the gritty world of detectives, reporters, and gangsters. Well, that world exists here as well except here you have men and women who are willing to work outside of the law on both sides to get a job done. Whereas the other books focus on the aforementioned detectives, private and otherwise, here the focus is more on the ones that hide who they are.

A man hangs himself in a neighborhood chapel. Bodies of young girls are being found in canals and rivers across the city with high levels of Mandrax in their bloodstream. McCoy is asked to watch over a colleague's niece, who has left home young and is running with a bad crowd in Glasgow. DS Wattie is attempting to become a sergeant. Drugs in Glasgow have gotten darker and more dangerous. Glasgow, its music, and its inhabitants all have rough edges in this hard city fought over by gangs, organized crime, the forces of law and order, and ordinary people trying to get by.

You may think being a superhero is all about dodging bullets, fancy armor, secret identities, and thwarting supervillains - but not in Spire City. Here, you have to deal with crazy shamanic visions, and Nazi butchers brought to USA after World War II. Need we mention the malevolent thought forms and gangs of freakish mutants? Modern city life is tough enough, but in Spire City even the superheroes are stretched to the breaking point when the villains have better lawyers.

Pete Fernandez is a mess. He’s on the brink of being fired from his middle-management newspaper job. His fiancée has up and left him. Now, after the sudden death of his father, he’s back in his hometown of Miami, slowly drinking himself into oblivion. But when a coworker he barely knows asks Pete to locate a missing daughter, Pete finds himself dragged into a tale of murder, drugs, double-crosses, and memories bursting from the black heart of the Miami underworld - and, shockingly, his father’s past.

It's corrupt to the bone and under the ever watchful surveillance system known as the Eye. Money has been abandoned in favor of the credit system. All citizens are required to carry hand held devises containing their credit score and personal information. Dylan is recovering from the government attitude adjustment program known as the Punch since his credits reached zero. His adopted son Jimmy is missing presumed dead and his basement office is infested with contrarian rats.

Private Detective Jazz Singer is enjoying a peaceful card game when a series of deadly explosions rip through the heart of Xeno City. Jazz has friends among the dead and wounded and he vows to make those responsible pay. As the bodies and the questions begin to pile up, along with Jazz’s mounting dinner bill, he is forced to use whatever means necessary to get to the bottom of things. Even if that means putting those he cares about in the line of fire.

Among the most self-assured and sharply crafted debuts in recent years, Calumet City detonates a Molotov cocktail of character-driven suspense and ghetto-Chicago intrigue. A powerful fiction debut that captures the precise emotional landscape of one cop's hard-bitten life in the trenches. This first-time author joins that rare breed whose fiction is suffused with profound authenticity.

Tom Wade, Detective bei der Major Crimes Unit, dem Dezernat für Schwerkriminalität, hat verdeckt mit dem FBI zusammengearbeitet und sieben seiner Kollegen der Korruption überführt - eine Entscheidung, die zu seiner Verbannung führt. Als gewöhnlicher Streifenpolizisten muss er nun im gefährlichsten Viertel von King City eine Stadtteilwache übernehmen: ohne jegliche Unterstützung und mit nur geringer Lebenserwartung. Doch Wade nimmt den Kampf auf. Er will wieder Ordnung in das heruntergekommene Viertel bringen...

Summer, 1962. A scorching heat wave is suffocating LA. PI Jim Keegan is offered a small fortune to find a beautiful woman from a set of photographs. He refuses; the job seems suspicious. But the next day the same woman, Eve, turns up, unbidden, on his doorstep. Eve fears for her safety. She is being watched. Before Keegan knows it, someone has been killed with Keegan’s own gun, and he gets sucked into a world of suspicion and betrayal where he’s never quite sure where the truth lies....

In City of Margins, the lives of several lost souls intersect in Southern Brooklyn in the early 1990s. There’s Donnie Parascandolo, a disgraced ex-cop with blood on his hands; Ava Bifulco, a widow whose daily work grind is her whole life; Nick, Ava’s son, a grubby high school teacher who dreams of a shortcut to success; Mikey Baldini, a college dropout who’s returned to the old neighborhood, purposeless and drifting; Donna Rotante, Donnie’s ex-wife, still reeling from the suicide of their teenage son.

It’s the worst year of the Great Depression, and America needs all the hope it can get. The Chicago World’s Fair, a glittery city-within-a-city, becomes a symbol of the good that’s yet to come. But every utopia has a seedy side—and that’s Rosa Mancuso’s world. As the mysterious Madame Mystique she mixes magic with a dose of bare skin burlesque, bringing customers to the home of the Fair’s carnival rides and spectacles.

As an amateur PI with a bent moral compass, Ash McKenna is good at finding people - but not at staying out of trouble. Between his own violent tendencies, the shadow cast by his father's death, and a self-destructive revenge quest, he made a mess of his life in NYC. Figuring it was time for a change of scenery Ash relocated to Portland, taking a job as a bouncer in a vegan strip club. And he hasn't had to hit anyone in six months. So when one of the club's dancers asks Ash for help finding her daughter, he declines, content to keep the darkness in his past.

Great War veteran and rising star Gene Hammons lost his job as a homicide detective when he tried to prove that a woman was wrongly convicted of murder to protect a well-connected man. Now a private investigator, Hammons makes his living looking for missing persons - a plentiful caseload during the Great Depression, when people seem to disappear all the time. But his routine is disrupted when his brother - another homicide detective, still on the force - enlists his help looking into the death of a young woman whose dismembered body is found beside the railroad tracks.

In the wake of a tragedy, 13-year-old Graham moves with his family to Beirut, Lebanon, a city on the edge of the sea and cataclysmic violence. Inquisitive and restless by nature, Graham suspects his State Department father is a CIA operative, and that their family’s fragile domesticity is merely a front for American efforts along the nearby Israeli border. Over the course of one year, 1974, Graham’s life will utterly change. Two men are murdered, his parent’s marriage disintegrates, and Graham, along with his two ex-pat friends, run afoul of forces they cannot understand.

The road to redemption is a perilous one! Frank Parker is still reeling from the Lenny Marquez Case and is working off his frustrations as a Katsaros enforcer. When Janet Foxx asks him to look into a so-called wrongful conviction, he finds himself trying to prove the innocence of one of Tycho City’s most notorious killers. The case’s broken path soon takes him to the infamous Pandrom Prison, where he’ll come face-to-face with old demons that could change everything and turn him away from his crusade to find his partner’s killer.

Oakland, California, 1983: a city churning with violent crime and racial conflict. Officer Hanson, a Vietnam veteran, has abandoned academia for the life-and-death clarity of police work, a way to live with the demons that followed him home from the war. But Hanson knows that justice requires more than simply enforcing the penal code. He believes in becoming a part of the community he serves - which is why, unlike most officers, he chooses to live in the same town where he works. This strategy serves him well...to a point. He forges a precarious friendship with the drug king of East Oakland.

You'd think a man in Frank Parker's position would be riding high, but the fame from the Latham Case has turned to notoriety. The TCPD won't be stalled in its quest for answers, IA's shadow seems closer than ever, and no one can be sure when the Loonies will chase down him or his family. When Katsaros hires him out for another "missing person", he worries it'll be Lenny Marquez all over again. However, every case is different, and he soon realizes this young man needs his help.