Noir Fiction

A string of mutilated bodies sees Detective Chief Inspector Whitney Walker back in action. But when she discovers the victims have all been grooming young girls, she fears a vigilante is on the loose. And while she understands the motive, no one is above the law. Once again, she turns to forensic psychologist, Dr Georgina Cavendish, to unravel the cryptic clues. But will they be able to save the next victim from a gruesome death?

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Never before in audio, these vintage stories are the darkest of the dark, and the best of the best.

Crime fiction fans old and new will delight in rediscovering these taut, character-rich, heart-stopping tales, now on audio for the first time.

It all happens so quickly. One day you’re living the dream, commuting to work by ferry with your charismatic neighbor Kit in the seat beside you. The next, Kit hasn’t turned up for the boat and his wife, Melia, has reported him missing. When you get off at your stop, the police are waiting. Another passenger saw you and Kit arguing on the boat home the night before, and the police say that you had a reason to want him dead. You protest.

When poor little New Hampshire rich girl Mindy Hollis gets lost in Los Angeles, her big sister hires private detective Ed Traynor to find her. Traynor and Hollis's security chief, Jack McMahon, take off for Tinseltown to track down the aspiring actress - but they discover the only part she ever got was the one that killed her. Their hunt for her killers takes them from the bowels of Mexico City to the glitz of Los Angeles, north to the set of The Black Orchid in Vancouver, and then back again to Hollywood, where the angels are dying.

First there was The Last Quarry, then there was The First Quarry - now look who's caught in the middle.

The enigmatic hit man Quarry - star of seven celebrated novels and an award-winning feature film (The Last Lullaby) - is back in this violent, steamy tale of warring crime families. When two godfathers set out to bump each other off, guess who winds up with both contracts….

Hoke Moseley has had enough. Tired of struggling against alimony payments, two teenage daughters, a very pregnant and very single partner, and a low-paying job as a Miami homicide detective, Hoke moves to Singer Island and vows never to set foot on the mainland again. But on the street, career criminal Troy Louden is hatching plans of his own with a gang that includes a disfigured hooker, a talentless artist, and a clueless retiree.

The halls are decked, the deck is stacked, and here comes that jolly old elf. Junior Bender, divorced father of one and burglar extraordinaire, finds himself stuck inside the Edgerton Mall, and not just as a last-minute shopper (though he is that too). Edgerton isn't exactly the epicenter of holiday cheer, despite its two Santas, canned Christmas music, chintzy bows, and festive lights. The mall is a fossil of an industry in decline; many of its stores are closed, and to make matters worse, there is a rampant shoplifting problem.

Lionel Walk, better known as Train, is a young black caddy at an elite Los Angeles golf course. There, he navigates between careless hostility of patrons and the volatile brutality of the other caddies. One day, he finds an unexpected protector: police sergeant Miller Packer, who Train dubs "the Mile-Away Man" for his distant gaze. Packer is investigating a botched and bloody boat hijacking that left a lone survivor: achingly beautiful Norah Still.

The ruthless professional killer known as Quarry long ago disappeared into a well-earned retirement. But now a media magnate has lured the restless hit man into tackling one last lucrative assignment. The target is an unlikely one - why, Quarry wonders, would anyone want a beautiful young librarian dead? And why in hell does he care?

Gardez votre sang-froid, la nuit sera longue. Il y a quinze ans, la vie de Nap Dumas a basculé : dernière année de lycée, son frère jumeau et la petite amie de celui-ci ont été retrouvés morts sur la voie ferrée. Double suicide d'amoureux ? Nap n'y a jamais cru. Désormais flic, Nap voit ressurgir le passé : Rex, leur ami d'enfance, vient d'être sauvagement assassiné. Sur les lieux du crime, les empreintes d'une femme que Nap pensait disparue : Maura, son amour de jeunesse, dont il était sans nouvelles depuis quinze ans. Le choc est total pour le policier. Celle qu'il aimait serait-elle une dangereuse psychopathe ?

"Relativement à la très-étrange et pourtant très-familière histoire que je vais coucher par écrit, je n'attends ni ne sollicite la créance. Vraiment, je serais fou de m'y attendre dans un cas où mes sens eux-mêmes rejettent leur propre témoignage. Cependant, je ne suis pas fou, - et très certainement je ne rêve pas. Mais demain je meurs, et aujourd'hui je voudrais décharger mon âme."

Ex-Army criminal investigator Rachel Hatch is a drifter. No home. No commitments. Until her sister's drowning drags her back to the town she left 15 years ago. Convinced her sister's death was no accident, Hatch partners with the local sheriff, Dalton Savage, to uncover the truth. Every answer unlocks another question, and as the investigation begins to unravel, Hatch and Savage find their lives on the line. Hatch is forced to use her special set of skills - forged on the field of combat - to learn the truth about her sister and bring those responsible to justice.

Tragiquement connue pour son histoire violente et chaotique ainsi que pour la catastrophe qui l’a frappé en 2010, Haïti est le pays le plus pauvre des Amériques - et l’un des plus riches sur le plan littéraire. Cette anthologie de dix-huit nouvelles, projet lancé avant le tremblement de terre, réaffirme le talent des auteurs contemporains haïtiens, aussi bien francophones qu’anglophones, qu’ils vivent sur place ou qu’ils soient issus de la diaspora, sur un terrain où ils ne sont pas forcément attendus : le genre noir.

Violence, love, and a torrent of blood. A man wakes in a grimy hotel to find his marriage has ended but not in divorce. An orphan discovers he has a sister and a grisly family secret. And the loss of an infant son drives a man back to his brutal, bad ways. From the Manhattan's Lower East Side to the west coast of Africa, the seven noir stories in this riveting collection cut to the core of what makes us human - and what makes us killers.

An eccentric boarding house denizen winds up dead; his presumed killer, a fellow boarder, has vanished. The baffling case unfolds through the testimony of witnesses, who are themselves suspect.

Since his debut novel, the modern classic The Ghosts of Belfast, was published a decade ago, Stuart Neville has published eight other critically acclaimed novels and achieved international recognition as one of crime fictions great living writers. Now for the first time Neville offers listeners a collection of his short fiction - 12 chilling stories that traverse and blend the genres of noir, horror, and speculative fiction and which bring the history and lore of Neville's native Northern Ireland to glittering life.

Hailed by Salman Rushdie as a "brilliantly innovative thriller-writer", Philip Kerr is the creator of taut, gripping, noir-tinged mysteries set in Nazi-era Berlin that are nothing short of spellbinding. The first book of the Berlin Noir trilogy, March Violets introduces listeners to Bernie Gunther, an ex-policeman who thought he'd seen everything on the streets of 1930s Berlin - until he turned freelance and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of Nazi subculture.

Cullrothes, in the Scottish Highlands, where Innes hides a terrible secret from his girlfriend, Alice, a gorgeous, cheating, lying schoolteacher. In the same village, Donald is the aggressive distillery owner, who floods the country with narcotics alongside his single malt; when his son goes missing, he becomes haunted by an anonymous American investor intent on purchasing the Cullrothes Distillery by any means necessary. Schoolgirl Jessie is trying to get the grades to escape to the mainland, while Grandpa counts the days left in his life.

Des bébés qui disparaissent, des écureuils pendus, un fétichiste du chiffre vingt-trois : méfiez-vous de Promise Falls ; derrière son apparente tranquillité, cette petite bourgade américaine cache la plus longue liste de faits divers jamais recensés... Dans un univers digne des premiers épisodes de "Twin Peaks", Barclay tisse une trilogie déroutante et pleine d'humour.

1955. Two young couples move to the uninhabited, isolated fjord of Hedinsfjörður. Then one of the women meets her death in mysterious circumstances. The case is never solved. Fifty years later an old photograph comes to light, and it becomes clear that the couples may not have been alone on the fjord after all. In nearby Siglufjörður, young policeman Ari Thór tries to piece together what really happened that fateful night, in a town where no one wants to know, where secrets are a way of life. Things take a sinister turn when a child goes missing in broad daylight.