Noir Fiction

Harper must deal with a dark part of her past when she defends her rapist, Michael Reynolds, who is charged with murdering a judge. Harper wants revenge, so she takes the case with the explicit desire to throw it. But as she digs deeper into the case, she understands that if she throws Michael's case, it means that the real culprit will go free. Struggling with her conscience, which is fighting for her desire for vengeance, Harper must access some of the darkest recesses of her brain.

In a sleepy Devon village, a woman is taken from the streets. Local vet Jenny is horrified. This kind of thing doesn’t happen here. But it’s not the first time she’s been so close to a crime scene. The daughter of a prolific serial killer, she’s spent her whole life running from who she really is. And the crime is harrowingly similar to those her father committed all those years ago.

Film star Amelie Hart is the darling of the silver screen, appearing on the front pages of every newspaper. But at the peak of her fame she throws it all away for a regular guy with an ordinary job. The gossip columns are aghast. Any hope the furore will die down is crushed when Amelie’s boyfriend, Dave, is arrested on charges of child sexual abuse. Dave strongly asserts his innocence, and when Amelie refuses to denounce him, the press witch hunt quickly turns into physical violence and she has to flee the country.

On the hottest day of the year, Caroline Harvey is found dead in Suffolk. Her body is found draped over a cot - but the baby she was looking after is missing. Hundreds of miles away, Siobhan Dillon is on a luxurious family holiday in France when her husband, Callum, is arrested by French police on suspicion of murder. As Siobhan’s perfect family is torn apart by the media in the nation’s frantic search for the missing baby, she desperately tries to piece together how Callum knew Caroline.

Two years have passed since the events of the bestselling Christine Falls, and much has changed for Quirke, the irascible, formerly hard-drinking Dublin pathologist. His beloved Sarah is dead, the Judge lies in a convent hospital paralyzed by a devastating stroke, and Phoebe, Quirke's long-denied daughter, has grown increasingly withdrawn and isolated. With much to regret from his last inquisitive foray, Quirke ought to know better than to let his curiosity get the best of him.

Six days before Baer Creighton cut down a cabal of dogfighters, a 16-year-old girl disappeared while walking home from school in Asheville, North Carolina. Witnesses later claimed they saw her in the back of a police car. Twenty-five years before that, an illegal fireworks plant blew up in Benton, Tennessee, killing 11, and raining M100 firecrackers over half a county. A few days later, a 13-year-old boy learned his highest calling was murder.

When two teenagers - Johannes and Mari - are found murdered inside their school, in the small Norwegian village of Fredheim, the finger is soon is pointed at 18-year-old Even, whose relationship with Mari ended just before she died. Mari was writing a story for the school newspaper about Even and his dad, who died in a car accident 10 years earlier. But was it really an accident? And had Mari uncovered information that someone was willing to commit murder to protect?

London, June 1965. Karl Braun arrives as a lodger in Pimlico: hatless, with a bow-tie, greying hair, slight in build. His new neighbours are intrigued by this cultured German gentleman who works as a piano tuner; many are fellow émigrés, who assume that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler. That summer, Braun courts a woman, attends classical concerts, dances the twist. But as the newspapers fill with reports of the hunt for Nazi war criminals, his nightmares become increasingly worse.

Henry Cimoli and Spenser have been friends for years, yet the old boxing trainer has never asked the private eye for a favor. Until now. A developer is trying to buy up Henry's condo on Revere Beach - with a push from local thugs. Soon, Spenser and his apprentice, Zebulon Sixkill, are on the trail of a mysterious woman, a megalomaniacal Las Vegas kingpin, and a shady plan to turn a chunk of land north of Boston into a sprawling casino. As alliances shift and twisted dreams surface, the Boston political machine looks to end Spenser's investigation one way or another.

The unblinking story of two lost and self-destructive drifters - a failed painter working as a counterman in a cheap diner and a woman in flight from domestic violence - trying to find a place for themselves in the back streets of San Francisco, Pick-Up is hardboiled writing at its nihilistic best.

Siglufjörður: an idyllically quiet fishing village in Northern Iceland, where no one locks their doors - accessible only via a small mountain tunnel. Ari Thór Arason: a rookie policeman on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik - with a past that he’s unable to leave behind.

Spenser's out to make war, not love, as he goes after Boston's entire X-rated industry. Pretty teenager April Kyle has disappeared into the city's darkest underworld, and to rescue her, Spencer pits muscle and wit against bullets and bullies.

Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Nobody Move is at once an homage to and a variation on literary form. It salutes one of our most enduring and popular genres - the American crime novel - but does so with a grisly humor and outrageousness that are Denis Johnson's own. Sexy, suspenseful, and above all entertaining, Nobody Move shows one of our greatest novelists at his versatile best.

Coalville is on fire—from below. The old mines are burning, and everyone has poison gas in their brain. Maybe that’s why the town is so corrupt. Now that he’s a Benedictine monk, Tommy Martini never wants to see the place again—hell-raisers there hold a grudge till they die, and he’s on their wish list. But a girl he once loved has gone missing, and his best friend from childhood has been murdered. Among the living is a shy girl from Tommy’s past, who wants to help. Together, they learn the secret of the elephant’s graveyard, and it’s not in Africa.

David Trevellyan, a Royal Navy intelligence operative, takes a late-night walk to his New York City hotel. A huddled shape in an alley catches his eye - a homeless man has been shot to death. Trevellyan steps forward and a cop car arrives. A split second too late, Trevellyan realizes he's been set up. Obliged to clear his name, and with no idea who's a friend and who's a foe, he penetrates deep into a huge international conspiracy.

Icelandic sisters Áróra and Ísafold live in different countries and aren‘t on speaking terms, but when their mother loses contact with Ísafold, Áróra reluctantly returns to Iceland to find her sister. But she soon realises that her sister isn’t avoiding her...she has disappeared. As she confronts Ísafold’s abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend Björn, and begins to probe her sister’s reclusive neighbours, Áróra is led into an ever-darker web of intrigue and manipulation.

It is an obsession that has haunted Nick Malick for seven years - to avenge the murder of his young son. In his gut Malick knows who did it. But the psychopath is in prison for another crime, scheduled to be released in a year. All Malick has to do is wait...and survive.

Tippy the triceratops was once a little girl's imaginary friend, a dinosaur detective who could help her make sense of the world. But when her father died, Tippy fell into the Stillreal, the underbelly of the Imagination, where discarded ideas go when they're too real to disappear. Now, he passes time doing detective work for other unwanted ideas - until Tippy runs into The Man in the Coat, a nightmare monster who can do the impossible: kill an idea permanently. Now Tippy must overcome his own trauma and solve the case, before there's nothing left but imaginary corpses.

Dans son cottage de bord de mer, Beatrix Abberley est assassinée en pleine nuit. Étrangement, elle paraissait s'y attendre ; elle semblait même savoir qui allait la tuer. Pour Charlotte Ladram - sa nièce par alliance, qui hérite du domaine -, le choc est terrible. Très vite, un homme est accusé. Peut-être trop vite. Car un épais mystère règne autour de Tristram Abberley, le frère de la défunte, célèbre poète mort en 1938 pendant la guerre d'Espagne. Que s'est-il passé là-bas, pour que des ombres que l'on croyait enfouies ressurgissent avec une telle sauvagerie ?

A suspicious death, a pregnant woman suddenly gone missing: Quirke's latest case leads him inexorably toward the dark machinations of an old foe. Perhaps Quirke has been down among the dead too long. Lately the Irish pathologist has suffered hallucinations and blackouts, and he fears the cause is a brain tumor. A specialist diagnoses an old head injury caused by a savage beating; all that's needed, the doctor declares, is an extended rest.