Noir Mystery Thriller

Cherry, Nebraska, population 312, is just off the highway between the sticks and the boonies. It’s where Dave Rhodes and his friends have lived all their lives. They own businesses, raise families, pay taxes, deal with odd neighbors, and, once or twice a month - just like their fathers before them - transform into wolves.

Easy Rawlins, L.A.'s most reluctant detective, comes home one day to find Easter, the daughter of his friend, Christmas Black, left on his doorstep. Easy knows that this could only mean that ex-marine Black is probably dead, or will be soon. But Easter's appearance is only the beginning, as Easy is immersed in a sea of problems.

Comprising two distinct short novels - Monroe's Nightmare in Paradise and Bad Luck Shadow from critically acclaimed Victor McGlothin - Borrow Trouble is a hot double-feature that perfectly showcases each author's unique style.

Nightmare Alley is American author William Lindsay Gresham’s first and best-known work. The novel - most admired by noir fiction fans - was published in 1946, adapted into a film in 1947 starring Tyrone Power and subsequently printed as a graphic novel by Spain Rodriquez. During the 1940s Gresham worked as an editor for a genuine crime pulp magazine in New York, during which period he wrote this book; characters range from hustlers to Machiavellian femme fatales in a dark world of show business.

Los hermanos Carl y Roy Opgard han triunfado, por así decirlo, en la vida. O al menos lo han hecho partiendo de las ínfimas posibilidades que les brinda un pueblo pequeño como Os. Carl dirige el ostentoso balneario, mientras que Roy sigue a cargo de la gasolinera y sueña con un parque de atracciones a lo grande, con una gigantesca montaña rusa, la mayor del mundo construida en madera.

"Ici, on a tous du sang indien et quand ce n'est pas dans les veines, c'est sur les mains." Le 11 juin 1981, trois cents policiers de la sûreté du Québec débarquent sur la réserve de Restigouche pour s'emparer des filets des Indiens mig'maq. Émeutes, répression et crise d'ampleur : le pays découvre son angle mort.

Roommates Kelly and Chloe are enjoying their lives and their downtown Detroit loft just fine. Kelly is a Victoria's Secret catalog model. Chloe is an escort, until she decides to ditch her varied clientele in favor of a steady gig as girlfriend to eighty-four-year-old retired lawyer Tony Paradiso, a.k.a. Mr. Paradise.

In a red brick house on a tree-lined street, DC homicide detective Alex Blum stares at the bullet-pocked body of Chris Doyle. As he roots around for evidence, he finds an old polaroid: the decedent, arm in arm with Arthur Holland, Blum's informant from years ago when he worked at the Narcotics branch. But Arthur has been missing for days. Blum’s only source: Arthur’s girl, Celeste—beautiful, seductive, and tragic—whom he can’t get out of his head. Blum is drawn to her and feels compelled to save her from Arthur’s underworld.

A serial killer stalks women in rural Ohio. He is deranged but brilliant, known only by the grotesque nickname the media has given him - The Doll Parts Killer. The name is apt. He dismembers his victims and leaves them in garbage bags in public places. A residential neighborhood. Next to a roller rink. Behind a Burger King. The investigation is a disaster. No physical evidence. Unreliable witnesses. To make matters worse, the FBI has lost contact with the star profiler working the case.

Atlantica - the forgotten isle, the glittering gem in the cesspool of humanity's future. Anything you do inside your own home is allowed. It is a dog-eat-dog world of millionaires and billionaires. The rest of society beneath them live in ignorance. Those at the top have money, tools, people, assassins, and murderers. One such assassin was a rumor, a myth, a ghost in the night. The Red Countess, the lady Valentina Winters. A player among the elite has something Valentina wants, and she is willing to do most anything to get it.

When PI Dave Wakeland is hired by a terminally ill woman to discover the whereabouts of her adopted child, who disappeared as an adult more than a decade earlier, it seems like just another in a string of poor career decisions. Wakeland is a talented private investigator with next to zero business sense. And even though he finds himself with a fancy new office and a corporate-minded partner, he continues to be drawn to cases that are usually impossible to solve and frequently don’t pay. But it turns out this case is worse than usual, even by his standards.

September 1977. Mette Misvãr, a three-year-old girl, disappears without trace from the sandpit outside her home. Her tiny, close middle-class community in the tranquil suburb of Nordas is devastated, but their enquiries and the police produce nothing. Curtains twitch, suspicions are raised, but Mette is never found.

When Jackie is released from prison, his boss Pino sends a limo to pick him up. Even fresh out of the joint, ruthless Jackie is ready to work, collecting money for the mob and using his special training to take care of bad accounts—permanently.

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.

Late one winter afternoon in upstate New York, George Clare comes home to find his wife killed and their three-year-old daughter alone—for how many hours?—in her room across the hall. He had recently, begrudgingly, taken a position at a nearby private college (far too expensive for local kids to attend) teaching art history, and moved his family into a tight-knit, impoverished town that has lately been discovered by wealthy outsiders in search of a rural idyll.

A young man with Down's syndrome has been convicted of burning down his care home and killing five people, but a fellow inmate at his secure psychiatric unit has hired Thora to prove Jakob is innocent. If he didn't do it, who did? And how is the multiple murder connected to the death of Magga, killed in a hit and run on her way to babysit?

In Amped, people are implanted with a device that makes them capable of superhuman feats. The powerful technology has profound consequences for society, and soon a set of laws is passed that restricts the abilities - and rights - of "amplified" humans. On the day that the Supreme Court passes the first of these laws, 29-year-old Owen Gray joins the ranks of a new persecuted underclass known as "amps." Owen is forced to go on the run, desperate to reach an outpost in Oklahoma where, it is rumored, a group of the most enhanced amps may be about to change the world - or destroy it.

There's a different schemer or slimeball behind every door: cocaine duckpins who have survived only by the dumbest fortune, hard-luck gigolos desperate to score, undercover cops busting undercover cops who are running sting operations on undercover cops.

Murder isn’t uncommon in a big city, but when young women start turning up dead next to mysterious symbols painted in their blood, the police turn to Alex Lockerby to find the killer. Unfortunately, the bloody symbols aren’t any form of magic Alex knows, leaving him precious little to work with and a nagging feeling that he’d better stop this madman before he finishes whatever spell he’s attempting.

Everyone knew the kind of girl Jean Timberlake was: wild, looking for trouble. But she certainly wasn't looking for murder. She was found dead on the beach 17 years ago, and an ex-boyfriend named Bailey Fowler was convicted of her murder and imprisoned, and then escaped. Now private eye Kinsey Millhone steps into a case that should have never been closed, in a town where there's no such thing as a private investigation.