Noir Fiction

Paris, 1938. Two women meet: Mielle, a shy pacifist and shunned Mennonite who struggles to fit in with the elite cohort of foreign correspondents stationed around the city; the other, Jane, a brash American journalist, who is soon to become a fascist propagandist. When World War II makes landfall in the City of Lights, Mielle falls under Jane’s spell, growing ever more intoxicated by her glamour, self-possession, and reckless confidence. But as this recklessness devolves into militarism and an utter lack of humanity, Mielle is seized by a series of visions that show her an inescapable truth.

Mard Audran has risen from hustling on the streets of the decadent Budayeen ghetto to being the right-hand man of one of the Maghreb's most feared men. As an enforcer for the powerful Friedlander Bey, Mard is just beginning to enjoy his newfound wealth and privilege, when he and Bey are betrayed by a rival and accused of murder.

When Tyron Shaw returns to his hometown of Las Vegas after 11 years in the Marines, he’s surprised to discover that two of his best friends from childhood are all anyone is talking about: Antoine Deco, three years out of prison, hasn’t lost a boxing match since his release and is fighting tonight in the undercard to the fight of the decade; and Keenan Quinn, a police officer who killed an unarmed teenager and escaped punishment from the courts, is the subject of a protest tomorrow morning.

Le premier volet d'une nouvelle série policière (650 000 exemplaires vendus en Italie), dont l'adaptation TV est en cours, par les producteurs de la série Commissaire Montalbano, d'après les romans d'Andrea Camilleri. Le corps momifié d'une femme est retrouvé dans une villa sur les pentes de l'Etna, alors que le volcan répand une pluie de cendres noires sur toute la région. L'enquête est confiée à la commissaire Vanina Guarrasi qui, après trois années passées à Milan, est revenue dans sa Sicile natale diriger la brigade criminelle de Catane.

When a disgraced politician is found dead at his London flat, there are few people who mourn his demise. George Dent’s reputation was in tatters, and his suicide surprises nobody - except one. Dent’s childhood friend Peter Timms is certain the MP’s downfall was a set-up; why else was he being stalked in the weeks before his death? Timms can even name the culprit - the only problem is, he’s been dead for seventy years. But broke PI Kenny Gabriel can’t afford to be cynical. He agrees to round up Dent’s old school gang, although some of them are less than keen to be found.

General Sternwood ist steinalt, steinreich und hat zwei schöne, wilde Töchter. Die aufreizende Carmen wird erpresst, und Privatdetektiv Philip Marlowe soll die Sache aus der Welt schaffen...

The LaCroixs are four beautiful Haitian American women bound by money and blood. On the surface, the LaCroix Group is a venture capitalist company, but underneath, it’s so much more. The four sisters run long cons, targeting wealthy, prominent business figures. They have a system: Find the perfect mark, create the problem, then present the solution. For a cost....

If there’s one thing Hap Collins and Leonard Pine like, it’s trouble - and they especially like getting paid to find it. So when their friend and sometime boss Marvin Harmon asks the boys to look into a cold-case double homicide, they’re happy to oblige. It turns out that both victims were set to inherit some serious money, and one of them ran with an honest-to-goodness vampire cult. The more closely Hap and Leonard look over the crime-scene photos, the more trouble they see.

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.

Detective Louise Rick is on a beach in Thailand when the panicked call from her father comes through. Louise′s beloved brother, Mikkel, has attempted suicide. His wife, Trine, left him days earlier, walking out the door one day with no warning and leaving Mikkel devastated. Louise rushes home to Osted, the small, insular Danish town where she grew up and where Mikkel still lives. But the more Louise learns about Trine and her state of mind in the days before she left Mikkel, the more Louise begins to wonder whether Trine really meant to leave him.

Thousands of girls go missing every year in Las Vegas. Taken. Bought and sold. Or worse. These lost girls summon FBI Profiler Violet Darger to Sin City. There are fresh dead to sort through - two bodies burned beyond recognition in the trunk of a sedan - and there’s reason to believe there are missing girls waiting to be saved. Rumors swirl that a legendary killer is responsible for these crimes: an escaped prisoner with a personal grudge against Darger. One who disappeared for 20 years. If Darger finds the killer in time, the girls will live. If not...

A completely revised edition of the first Henry Rios mystery, The Little Death, Lay Your Sleeping Head introduces Michael Nava’s singular protagonist, gay Latino criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios. Rios, beset by personal and professional problems, begins a passionate affair with the black sheep heir to a great California fortune who tells Rios an improbable tale of murder and sexual predation in his wealthy family. When the young man is found dead of an apparent drug overdose, Rios begins an investigation that ultimately reveals much more than murder.

A troubled war hero. A criminal mastermind. And the meeting of two fatal enemies....

Freddy Otash was the man in the know and the man to know in '50s LA. He was a rogue cop, a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp - and, most notably, the head strong-arm goon for Confidential magazine. Confidential presaged the idiot internet - and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank.

"Readers of Brooklyn Noir will recall that its contents were labeled by neighborhood - Bay Ridge, Canarsie, Greenpoint, etc. We have chosen the same principle here, and the book's contents do a good job of covering the island, from C.J. Sullivan's Inwood and Charles Ardai's Upper East Side, to Justin Scott's Chelsea and Carol Lea Benjamin's Greenwich Village."

1955. Two young couples move to the uninhabited, isolated fjord of Hedinsfjörður. Then one of the women meets her death in mysterious circumstances. The case is never solved. Fifty years later an old photograph comes to light, and it becomes clear that the couples may not have been alone on the fjord after all. In nearby Siglufjörður, young policeman Ari Thór tries to piece together what really happened that fateful night, in a town where no one wants to know, where secrets are a way of life. Things take a sinister turn when a child goes missing in broad daylight.

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.

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.

Everyone who lives at 23 Beulah Grove has a secret. If they didn't, they wouldn't be renting rooms in a dodgy old building for cash - no credit check, no lease. It's the kind of place you end up when you you've run out of other options.The six residents mostly keep to themselves, but one unbearably hot summer night, a terrible accident pushes them into an uneasy alliance. What they don't know is that one of them is a killer. He's already chosen his next victim, and he'll do anything to protect his secret.

Kenny Gabriel is three years away from turning sixty, has forty-three quid in the bank and is occasionally employed to find people who would rather not be found. Broke, clientless and depressed, he knows things can't get much worse. Then he's summoned to the office of London media magnate Frank Parr, whose daughter, Harry, is missing - and there's ten grand on the table to get her back. But he and Frank have a history he'd rather not revisit.