Noir Fiction

Written years before Jordan Harper’s breakout success, Everybody Knows, this stirring and brutal bildungsroman tells the story of young Luke Crosswhite, who after years apart from his criminal family returns to their flock deep in the California desert. Luke’s father is serving time for a brutal murder that Luke himself witnessed; now, his uncle vies for power and rival biker gangs encroach on the family’s various criminal enterprises.

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.

Alicia Bjelke has always been the "other sister," the foil to her beautiful sister Stella—people turn their backs when they see Alicia's disfigured face. So she created a life in the background, becoming a coding genius and founding a groundbreaking dating app company. With Stella as the face of the company, Alicia has found success. Until one day, when Stella is found dead and Alicia’s life takes the wrong turn. Soon, she realizes that she is the next target.

From the creator, writer, and executive producer of the HBO series True Detective and soon to be a major motion picture comes a dark and visceral novel set along the wastelands of Galveston. On the same day Roy Cady is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he learns that his employer has put a hit out on him. After narrowly escaping an attempt on his life, Cady goes on the run with a young prostitute named Rocky and her three-year-old sister, from New Orleans to Galveston, Texas. But though they run, they cannot hide in this explosive, atmospheric, impossible-to-pause thrill ride.

Un tueur à gage tombe amoureux de sa cible... Logen, ville de la déchéance humaine. Ville dans laquelle les sirènes de police ont remplacé les chants des oiseaux, où les gangs s'affrontent sans relâche au milieu d'une population pauvre et sans défense, ou presque. Soit t'y nais et tu te bats, soit t'y crèves. La drogue, les armes sont mon quotidien. Tout est une question de calculs, de fric, de choix. Un contrat signé : tuer l'autre pour de l'argent. Facile, tellement fait et refait que ça sera rapide. Mais cette fois-ci, la nana à liquider me plaît. Son nom ? Amyliana.

It was just another Tuesday morning when she walked into the office - young, as I suspected they all might be, another dark brunette with some assistance and enough eye black to match up to Cleopatra. And who am I? I'm Ray, the world's last robot, famed and feared in equal measure, which suits me just fine - after all, the last place you'd expect to find Hollywood's best hit man is in the plain light of day.

"Il m'aura fallu courir le monde et tomber d'un toit pour saisir que je disposais là, sous mes yeux, dans un pays si proche dont j'ignorais les replis, d'un réseau de chemins campagnards ouverts sur le mystère, baignés de pur silence, miraculeusement vides. La vie me laissait une chance, il était donc grand temps de traverser la France à pied sur mes chemins noirs. Là, personne ne vous indique ni comment vous tenir, ni quoi penser, ni même la direction à prendre." (Sylvain Tesson)

This drive through the dark streets of the Motor City “is one of the best in Akashic Books’ noir series. You cannot go wrong with this anthology.”—Reviewing the Evidence From cri….

George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too-scrupulous writer for a New York media conglomerate in the heyday of Henry Luce. One day, before heading home to his wife in the suburbs, Stroud has a drink with Pauline, the beautiful girlfriend of his boss, Earl Janoth. Things happen. The next day Stroud escorts Pauline home, leaving her off at the corner just as Janoth returns from a trip. The day after that, Pauline is found murdered in her apartment.

La série culte ! Violette, Klaus et Prunille devraient se plaire dans leur nouveau collège. Mais ce collège-ci est assez spécial, et la vérité est que les orphelins s'apprêtent à y vivre un bien sinistre épisode. À titre d'exemple, dans ces treize chapitres, les trois enfants vont devoir faire face à une tribu de crabes malveillants, à un règlement stupide, à de longs récitals de violon, à de redoutables tests de contrôle et au système métrique... Dès 11 ans.

All that’s left of her is a depression in the dirt and a pool of blood. Robert Maxim is ruthless, powerful, and determined to find her. April Madden is a preacher’s wife, and Sydney’s mother. She’s willing to risk everything...her sobriety, her marriage, even her faith, to hunt for her daughter. But they can’t find Sydney Rye if she doesn’t want to be found. ISIS has a new enemy, a ghost haunting their territory, infecting their flock with radical ideals. They will do anything to capture her. Their reign depends on this new prophet’s destruction.

Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy listeners who are sick of the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a little bit of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal society. This stylistically diverse collection will make you squirm in your seat, stay up at night, laugh out loud, and inevitably wish for more.

Payatas, a 50-acre dump northeast of Manila's Quezon City, is home to thousands of people who live off of what they can scavenge there. It is one of the poorest neighborhoods in a city whose law enforcement is already stretched thin, devoid of forensic resources, and rife with corruption. So when the eviscerated bodies of preteen boys begin to appear in the dump heaps, there is no one to seek justice on their behalf. In the rainy summer of 1997, two Jesuit priests take the matter of protecting their flock into their own hands.

The adoring wife of a senatorial candidate has a smile as sweet as candy and dots her "i's" with little hearts. A blond beauty, she is the perfect mate for an ambitious politician, but she has a little problem with sex and drugs--a problem someone has managed to put on videotape. The big boys figure a little blackmail will put her husband out of the race. Until Spenser hops on the candidate's bandwagon.

When you’re in trouble, you call 911. When cops are in trouble, they call Nick Ryan. Every cop in the city knows his name, but no one says it out loud. In fact, they don’t talk about him at all. He doesn’t wear a uniform, but he is the most powerful cop in New York. Nick Ryan can find a criminal who’s vanished. Or he can make a key witness disappear. He has cars, safe houses, money, and weapons hidden all over the city.

When Sam Spade gets drawn into the Maltese Falcon case, we know what to expect: straight talk, hard questions, no favors, and no way for anyone to get underneath the protective shell he wears like a second skin. We know that his late partner, Miles Archer, was a son of a bitch; that Spade is sleeping with Archer's wife, Iva; that his tomboyish secretary, Effie Perine, is the only innocent in his life. What we don't know is how Spade became who he is. Spade & Archer completes the picture.

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton arrive in the North Carolina mountains to create a timber empire, vowing to let no one stand in their way, especially those newly rallying around Teddy Roosevelt's nascent environmental movement.

Austin joins Dallas and Houston in Akashic's deep dive into the Lone Star State's darkest dimensions. Featuring brand-new stories by: Gabino Iglesias, Ace Atkins, Amanda Moore, Jeff Abbott, Scott Montgomery, Richard Z. Santos, Alexandra Burt, Lee Thomas, Miriam Kuznets, Jacob Grovey, Chaitali Sen, Molly Odintz, Amy Gentry, and Andrew Hilbert.

For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can't refuse.The 200-year-old godfather of the Budayeen's underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.

"Serre-moi fort." Cela pourrait être un appel au secours désespéré. Du jeune Nick, d'abord. Marqué par la disparition inexpliquée de sa sœur, il est contraint de vivre dans un foyer brisé par l'incertitude et l'absence. Obsédés par leur quête de vérité, ses parents sont sur les traces de l'Origamiste, un tueur en série qui sévit depuis des années en toute impunité. Du lieutenant Adam Gibson, ensuite.