Noir Mystery Thriller

Scarlett Clark is an exceptional English professor. But she’s even better at getting away with murder. Every year, Dr. Clark searches for the worst man at Gorman University - professor, student, or otherwise - and plots his well-deserved demise. Thanks to her meticulous planning, she’s avoided drawing attention to herself…but as she’s preparing for her biggest kill yet, the school starts probing into the growing body count on campus.

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.

Set in 1991, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation has rocketed the cast to global fame, the young and impressionable actor Brent Spiner receives a mysterious package and a series of disturbing letters, that take him on a terrifying and bizarre journey that enlists Paramount Security, the LAPD, and even the FBI in putting a stop to the danger that has his life and career hanging in the balance.

James Stark, a.k.a. Sandman Slim, crawled out of Hell, took bloody revenge for his girlfriend’s murder, and saved the world along the way. After that, what do you do for an encore? You take a lousy job tracking down monsters for money. It’s a depressing gig, but it pays for your beer and cigarettes. But in L.A., things can always get worse. Like when Lucifer comes to town to supervise his movie biography and drafts Stark as his bodyguard.

Votre fille de 17 ans part de bon matin pour son petit boulot d'été. Elle vous promet d'être de retour pour le dîner. Mais elle ne rentrera pas. Ni ce soir-là, ni les suivants. Votre pire cauchemar a commencé... Pour Tim Blake, le père de Sydney, une seule mission : la retrouver à tout prix. Un coup de fil mystérieux, des individus menaçants, des meurtres... et la vie sans histoire de Tim bascule dans un engrenage incompréhensible et totalement terrifiant. Pourtant, galvanisé par son amour paternel, il ira jusqu'au bout, au risque de tout perdre...

When Mattie Winston catches her husband, Dr. David Winston, receiving some very special loving care from RN Karen Owenby, she quits her job and moves out. Mattie's best friend, Izzy, offers her a place to stay and suggests she'd be a natural as deputy coroner. Now, instead of taking patients' pulses, Mattie's weighing their hearts and livers. But Mattie's first homicide call turns out to be for none other than Nurse Karen, and even though she saw her ex in a heated argument with the newly deceased the night before, she refuses to believe David could be a killer.

First there was The Last Quarry, then there was The First Quarry - now look who's caught in the middle.

The enigmatic hit man Quarry - star of seven celebrated novels and an award-winning feature film (The Last Lullaby) - is back in this violent, steamy tale of warring crime families. When two godfathers set out to bump each other off, guess who winds up with both contracts….

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?

Bank robberies should run like clockwork, right? If your name's Parker, you expect nothing less. Until, that is, one of your partners gets too greedy for his own good. The four-way split following a job leaves too small a take for George Uhl, who begins to pick off his fellow hoisters, one by one. The first mistake? That he doesn't begin things by putting a bullet in Parker. That means he won't get the chance to make a second. One of the darkest novels in the series, this caper proves the adage that no one crosses Parker and lives.

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?

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. In Hong Kong Noir, 14 of the city’s finest authors explore the dark heart of the Pearl of the Orient in haunting stories of depravity and despair.

It is early 1942. You are in San Francisco, and you need a private eye. Sam Spade is rumored to be in Istanbul. The Continental Op has been drafted and is a sergeant in the Aleutians. Philip Marlowe is up at Little Fawn Lake investigating the disappearance of Mrs. Derace Kingsley. Lew Archer is in the army. Who's left? Nobody but C. Card. You haven't heard of C. Card? That's all right. Nobody has.

Wild Fire is the eighth and final book in the Shetland series from Ann Cleeves, the number one bestselling author and creator of Vera and the Two Rivers. Rumours of an affair surround a woman found hanged – on the most troubling case of his career, Inspector Jimmy Perez must work with Willow Reeves once again, and she has news that will change his life forever.

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.

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.

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.

Angelo DiNoto is the most powerful crime lord in New Jersey, his empire sustained by pure heroin from the poppies of an old Turkish farmer. That is, until a $5 million dollar shipment goes missing. Richard Mundi, a shady developer, sees the lost heroin as capital infusion for his failing business. His daughter, Gloria, literally in bed with would-be revolutionaries, thinks it's her ticket out. "Mailman", a long-time postal clerk dying of cancer, believes finding the heroin would be perfect ending to a failed life....

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.

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.

Cold Storage, Alaska, is a remote fishing outpost where salmonberries sparkle in the morning frost and where you just might catch a King Salmon if you're Zen enough to wait for it. Settled in 1935 by Norse fishermen who liked to skinny dip in its natural hot springs, the town enjoyed prosperity in the mid-20th century, at the height of the frozen fish boom. But now the cold storage plant is all but abandoned and the population is shrinking every day.