Noir Fiction

Philippa Watson, a good-natured yet troubled 17-year-old, has just moved to Washington, DC. She’s lonely until she meets Judy Peabody, a brilliant and tempestuous classmate. The girls become unlikely friends and fashion themselves as intellectuals, drawing the notice of Christine Martins, their dazzling English teacher, who enthralls them with her passion for literature and her love of noirish detective fiction. When Philippa returns a novel Miss Martins has lent her, she interrupts a man grappling with her in the shadows.

Just when Nolan’s looking for a way out of his dead-end job, trouble comes knocking, and he’s back in business. Someone harboring an old grudge has just picked off Joey DiPreta, a crooked businessman with ties to the mob, and the guy’s family is out to get whoever’s responsible. So is Nolan’s family - in Chicago - and they offer him big bucks and a piece of a swank hotel if he’ll protect their interests.

Atlantica - the forgotten isle, the glittering gem in the cesspool of humanity's future. Anything you do inside your own home is allowed. Those with obscene wealth find it a haven, while every major country of in the world craves the secrets they believe are buried in the mist. Where mystery happens, John Chambers can exist: ex-soldier, gritty realist, detective. It's whispered that John "Dick" Chambers is the man you go to when you need someone who can't be bought.

Gideon Oliver expects to be amicably bored when he takes on the role of "accompanying spouse" at a lodge in the magnificent wild country of Glacier Bay, Alaska, where his forest ranger wife, Julie, is attending a conference. But it turns out to be exactly his cup of tea. There is another group at the lodge: six scientists on a memorial journey to the site of a 30-year-old glacial avalanche that killed three of their colleagues. Their leader is TV's most popular science personality, the unctuous M. Audley Tremaine - the sole survivor of the fatal avalanche. But he does not survive long.

Following the success of Paris Noir, the Akashic Noir Series has expanded to include the famously diverse and sometimes controversial suburbs of this legendary city.

Les souvenirs, c'est comme les cadavres : tôt ou tard, ils refont surface. Qui est cet homme assis sur la plage en pleine tempête, sur le lieu d'un crime commis vingt ans plus tôt ? Il n'a pas de nom, pas de manteau, et a perdu la mémoire. Alice prend l'inconnu sous son aile et décide de l'héberger, sans savoir qu'il va bouleverser sa vie à jamais. Au même moment, dans la banlieue de Londres, Lily attend en vain le retour de l'homme qu'elle vient d'épouser et dont la police tarde à signaler la disparition. Parviendra-t-elle à retrouver celui pour qui elle a tout abandonné ?

The stories that you will hear in this collection highlight all things Accra, everything that the city was and is - the remaining vestiges of colonialism, the pride of independence, the nexus of indigenous tribes and other groups from all over the world, the tension between modernity and traditionalism, the symbolism and storytelling both obvious and coded, the moral high ground, the duplicity and deceit, the most basic human failings laid bare alongside fear and love and pain, and the corrupting desire to have the very things you are not meant to have.

Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art—a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple: it departs from the infamous real-life “Code Noir,” a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multi-layered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.

After he fails to save a stranger from being mauled to death by a bear, a young mercenary is saddled with the baby girl the man died to protect. Now, 16 years later, that young mercenary has grown up to become cynical sword jockey Eddie LaCrosse. When his vacation travels bring him back to that same part of the world, he can't resist trying to discover what has become of the mysterious infant. He finds that the child, now a lovely young teenager named Isadora, is at the center of a complicated web of intrigue.

Naples, 1932. A week before Easter, springtime offers fragrant temptations to the men and women of Naples - but evil also lurks in the sweet-smelling spring air. At the high-class brothel in the center of town known as Paradiso, Viper, the most famous prostitute of all, is found dead after being suffocated with a pillow. Her last client swears that he left her alive and well. But when her next client arrived, he found her dead. Who killed her and why?

When Miami homicide detective Hoke Moseley receives an unexplained order to let his beard grow, he doesn't think much about it. He hastoo much going on at home, especially with a man he helped convict ten years before moving in across the street. Hoke immediately assumes the worst, andc onsidering he has his former partner, her newborn, and his two teenage daughters living with him, he doesn't like the situation one bit.

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?

My life has room for exactly two women: my daughter Rusty and my best friend Charlotte - known to everyone as Charlie. One is a feisty, tomboyish firecracker. The other is my seven-year-old. I can’t imagine life without either. So when my ex springs a custody hearing on me, I find myself telling the judge that I’m engaged to Charlie. The only problem? I’m not. Time to fake an engagement. Pretending we’re a couple will be no big deal.

After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now, more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead.

Marisol locks me out of my own concert by accident. She's wearing a suit at a rock show, searching for her lost law school textbook, has no idea who I am, and for the first time in years, I'm hooked. She's smart, driven, and utterly gorgeous. The sort of girl who earnestly believes in following the rules and hates when others don't. I'm a huge rock star, recovering addict, and general f--kup. Our relationship is for show and that's all. But with every smile, every laugh, and every breathtaking glance at her curves, I want her more.

Three cell phones ring in an opulent London suite. The calls go unanswered, because their recipients are dead. Earlier that night, four old friends and lovers meet for a reunion dinner. Miko and Robert haven't seen each other in 10 years; Miko hates Robert for the money he's made with shady ethics. Unbeknownst to Miko, his wife, Veera, also slept with Robert the last time everyone was together. Robert's young trophy wife, Elise, has no old grudges to bear, but will be swept up in the murderous fray.

In the weeks before hosting the 1976 Summer Olympics, the Montreal police are tightening security to prevent another catastrophe like the '72 games in Munich. But it isn't tight enough to stop nearly $3 million from being stolen in a bold daytime Brink's truck robbery. As the high-profile heist continues to baffle the police, Constable Eddie Dougherty gets a chance to prove his worth as a detective when he's assigned to assist the suburban Longueuil force in investigating the deaths of two teenagers returning from a rock concert across the Jacques Cartier Bridge.

During Fiesta, three desperate men converge in a perilous New Mexico town. It takes four days for Sailor to travel to New Mexico by bus. He arrives broke, sweaty, and ready to get what's his. It's the annual Fiesta, and the locals burn an effigy of Zozobra so that their troubles follow the mythical character into the fire. But for former senator Willis Douglass, trouble is just beginning.

Nobody plays accordion like Dick Contino. His skilled fingers can find beauty in even the schmaltziest Borscht Belt favorites, and with his matinee-idol looks he could be a real star. Right now, though, he’s slumming it as the headliner in a Grade Z teenybopper picture called Daddy-O. He’s too good for this movie, and finishing it is going to take him to a very dark place. Daddy-O and Dick Contino are both real, their stories dredged out of the past by James Ellroy, a master of historical crime fiction. In Dick Contino's Blues he takes us to B-List Hollywood in 1957 - a time when movies were cheerful and dirty secrets lurked just off camera.