Noir Fiction

Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s.

Aux États-Unis, de nos jours. Zack Walker a une obsession : la sécurité. Marié et père de deux enfants, cet auteur de science-fiction a préféré quitter un environnement urbain qu'il estime trop dangereux, pour une vie de banlieue bien paisible. Paisible ? A voir. Car Zack, en bon parano, continue de voir le danger partout : ses ados s'obstinent à laisser la porte d'entrée ouverte aux cambrioleurs potentiels et surtout, sa femme Sara laisse son sac à main à disposition de tous.

At the age of twenty-four, Griselda Satter lee has already lived two lifetimes. A star of the silver screen, she gives up Hollywood after a year and moves to New York to become a designer. While her ex-husband, Con, is out of town, she is staying in his apartment. Walking back one night, she meets two cheerful young men who want to go home with her - and won't take no for an answer.

La malédiction est brisée, mais le destin d’Emberfall n’est pas scellé. Dans le royaume, des rumeurs circulent : le prince Rhen ne serait pas l’héritier légitime. Seul Grey, le commandant de la garde, connaît la dangereuse vérité. Pour rester fidèle à son prince, il doit la taire et se cacher. Tandis que le trône vacille, Karis Luran, la reine ennemie, attend son heure. Seule sa fille, Lia Mara, espère pouvoir empêcher un nouveau bain de sang. Mais pour cela, elle doit conclure un pacte avec Emberfall. Et si Rhen ne veut pas de cette alliance, elle se tournera vers l’autre héritier : le commandant Grey lui-même.

This quartet of crime stories about deadly books, penned by award-winning contemporary mystery writers, includes The Little Men, What's in a Name?, The Book of the Lion, and From the Queen.

La petite ville de Promise Falls est sous le choc : les Langley viennent d'être sauvagement assassinés. Qui pouvait en vouloir à cette famille en apparence tranquille ? Qui a bien pu commettre cet acte aussi barbare que gratuit ? Les rues de cette banlieue réputée paisible sont-elles encore sûres ? Seul témoin du drame : Derek Cutter, dix-sept ans, qui n'aurait jamais dû se trouver là.

Sam Kelson is a PI like no other. As a consequence of being shot in the head while working undercover as a Chicago cop, he suffers from disinhibition: He cannot keep silent or tell lies when questioned. But truth be told - and Kelson always tells the truth - he still feels compelled to investigate and, despite the odds, he's good at his job.

"De loin, son meilleur roman." Olivier Delcroix, "Le Figaro Magazine". Quatre minutes. C'est le temps d'un souvenir pour Manon. Après, tout s'efface. Dans ces conditions, pas facile pour Lucie Henebelle de trouver par qui la jeune femme vient d'être agressée. Et de comprendre la signification des mots gravés au creux de sa paume : "Pr de retour".

When a murderer leaves a familiar pink scarf as his calling card, Detective Chief Inspector Whitney Walker is forced to dig into a cold case, not sure if she's looking for a killer or a copycat. With a growing pile of bodies, and no clues, she turns to forensic psychologist Dr. Georgina Cavendish despite their relationship being at an all-time low. Can they overcome the bad blood between them to solve the unsolvable?

Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness. A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett invented the noir crime novel.

When you are in the bush, pregnant, and your husband is hurt what do you do? Will you trust just about anyone? When their car gets a flat tire in the Australian outback, it should be a simple job for capable Hal to fix. His wife pregnant, he sets to it. But an accident befalls him, leaving him immobilized. Paige is now their only hope of getting out of the bush. When Paige chances upon a stranger, it seems her prayers are answered. But the stranger doesn't want to help. She wants something else, and it's not Paige's husband....

Paul Edgecombe, ancien gardien-chef d'un pénitencier dans les années 1930, entreprend d'écrire ses mémoires. Il revient sur l'affaire John Caffey - ce grand Noir au regard absent, condamné à mort pour le viol et le meurtre de deux fillettes - qui défraya la chronique en 1932. "La Ligne verte" décrit un univers étouffant et brutal, où la défiance est la règle. Personne ne sort indemne de ce bâtiment coupé du monde, où cohabitent une étrange souris apprivoisée par un Cajun pyromane, le sadique Percy Wetmore, et Caffey, prisonnier sans problème.

North Yorkshire, England. Detective Chief Inspector Harry Grimm is reluctantly easing into life in the dales. As he gradually acclimatizes to the slower pace of the countryside while he awaits a return to the city, he’s called out to inspect a farmer’s crushed body. And despite the doctor on site declaring it a tragic mishap, the seasoned police officer rolls up his sleeves when evidence points to foul play. With a mysterious clue the only connection and the not-so-quiet village in self-imposed lockdown, the city-bred cop hunts for a link lethal enough to lead to murder.

New York, 2061: The place called the Pleasure Academy is a living nightmare where abducted girls are trapped, trained for a life of abject service while their souls are slowly but surely destroyed. Dorian, a thirteen-year-old runaway who’d been imprisoned there, might never have made it out if not for her fellow inmate Mina, who’d hatched the escape plan. Mina was the more daring of the two—but they’d been equally desperate.

When McGee picks up the phone and hears a voice from the past, he can't help it. He has to meddle. Especially when he has the chance to reunite Sam Taggart, a reckless, restless man like himself, with the woman who's still waiting for him. But what begins as a simple matchmaking scheme soon becomes a bloody chase that takes McGee to Mexico, a beautiful country - and one from which he hopes to return alive.

Fuminori Nakamura's Akutagawa Prize-winner plunges us into the depths of a young man's winding, troubled psyche. An unnamed taxi driver in Tokyo has experienced a rupture in his everyday life. He cannot stop daydreaming of suicide, envisioning himself returning to the earth in what soon become terrifying blackout episodes. His live-in girlfriend, Sayuko, is in a similarly bad phase, surrendering to alcoholism to escape the memory of her miscarriage.

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….

Isobel Kingston is dead. Or so everyone believes. When a mysterious woman writes her last words in sand, Isobel steps out of the shadows to uncover the truth. As she plunges into a storm of betrayal, the winds are determined to throw Atticus Riot on her course, and the two detectives collide in a sea of madness and murder.

Documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed “The Lost Village”, since she was a little girl. In 1959, her grandmother’s entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and ever since, the unanswered questions surrounding the only two people who were left - a woman stoned to death in the town center and an abandoned newborn - have plagued her. She’s gathered a small crew of friends in the remote village to make a film about what really happened.

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.