Noir Fiction

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.

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.

Something deadly is lurking in the swampy marshes of Moody Bog. For Kylie Strange, it just means more deaths she's responsible for since she's the one who accidentally unleashed a Pandora's box of horrors. She opened the Booke of the Hidden, and now she must do everything she can to close it for good, taking on every monster it releases with the help of the local coven. This time, the Booke has unleashed not one but two demons on the village. With her attention divided, Kylie and her coven of Wiccans are open to attack. But those aren't the only demons on Kylie's mind.

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.

When a prominent Manhattan lawyer is murdered, two estranged sisters - one the dead man’s widow, the other his ex - must set aside mistrust and old resentments...but can they escape their past?

Two terrible events, without obvious connection, shake Fjällbacka to its core. A famous photographer is found brutally murdered in a showroom. Henning Bauer, the Nobel prize winner in literature, suffers from a violent act on the small island where he is writing the 10th book in his world famous series. While Patrik Hedström and his colleagues at Tanumshede police station struggle to investigate the cases, Erica Falck researches a murder on a trans man in Stockholm in the 1980’s.

From the moment Lucy met her husband's mother, Diana, she was kept at arm's length. Diana was exquisitely polite and properly friendly, but Lucy knew she was not what Diana envisioned. That was five years ago. Now, Diana is dead, a suicide note found near her body. Diana claims she no longer wanted to live because of a battle with cancer. But the autopsy finds no cancer. The autopsy does find traces of poison and evidence of suffocation.

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.

Afin d’accéder à une magie supérieure et éviter que son histoire familiale ne se répète, Diana Bishop va devoir se défaire de ses peurs et libérer toute l’ampleur de ses pouvoirs. Le grand retour d’une héroïne puissante et fascinante.

Jun Nakayama was a silent-film star in the early days of Hollywood. By 1964, he is living in complete obscurity, until a young writer, Nick Bellinger, tracks him down for an interview. When Bellinger reveals that he has written a screenplay with Nakayama in mind, Jun is intrigued by the possibility of returning to movies. But he begins to worry that someone might delve too deeply into the past and uncover the events that abruptly ended his career in 1922. Like the changing social and racial tides in California - and the unsolved murder of his favorite director.

Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash. The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle

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.

Ten years ago, I adopted Blue after I broke up with my boyfriend one hot, early summer night with the windows open and the neighborhood listening. The next morning, I went straight to the pound in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Articles on buying your first dog tell you to never buy a dog on impulse. Going to the pound because you need something in your life that's worth holding onto is rarely, if ever, mentioned. I asked the man at the pound to show me the biggest dogs they had. He showed me some Rottweiler-German Shepherd puppies that he said would grow to be quite large.

In the city where he lost everything, he'll stop at nothing to learn the truth. Former NYPD detective Thomas Austin has spent three long years haunted by his wife Fiona's unsolved murder. Three years searching for answers. Three years finding little. Until one lead changes everything.

In the second book in the Dead Jack series, the zombie detective hits rock bottom, bingeing on fairy dust and formaldehyde 24/7. Reluctantly, he sets out with a fellow zombie, the narcissistic Garry, to find his long-lost soul. But a new threat emerges: a neo-Nazi group that hunts down the depressed corpse, believing his sidekick Oswald has the power to capture all the souls in Pandemonium. Again, the wicked world needs saving, but this time can Jack also save himself?

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.

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.

From the outside, Essie’s life looks idyllic: a loving husband, a beautiful house in a good neighborhood, and a nearby mother who dotes on her grandchildren. But few of Essie’s friends know her secret shame: that in a moment of maternal despair, she once walked away from her newborn, asleep in her carriage in a park. Disaster was avoided, and Essie got better, but she still fears what lurks inside her, even as her daughter gets older and she has a second baby.

In The Lady in the Lake, hard-boiled crime-fiction master Raymond Chandler brings us the story of a couple of missing wives - one a rich man's and one a poor man's - who have become the objects of Philip Marlowe's investigation. One of them may have gotten a Mexican divorce and married a gigolo, and the other may be dead. Marlowe's not sure he cares about either one, but he's not paid to care.

Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt”, he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends.