Comedy Crime Fiction

A laugh-out-loud mystery following the indomitable hot mess Mo Ellery, whose job as a school crossing guard pulls her into an unhinged murder investigation. Mo Ellery’s 29th birthday is a disaster. After one small accident—the exposure of her boyfriend’s genitals (well, maybe...

"On any list of writers that make me laugh, Mary Pauline Lowry is near the top. Last Night Was Killer, but it's also killer fun." -- Steven Rowley, New York Times bestselling author of The Guncle A suspenseful, bighearted, and laugh-out-loud story of a single mom trying to do it all—including...

In the haze of stale beer, bad jokes, and even worse poker hands, Joe, Ray, Mike, and Terry hatch the ultimate midlife crisis: robbing a bank. They're not criminals, just four average blokes with too much time, too little money, and one tragically convincing plan scribbled on the back of a pizza box. But what starts as a beer-fuelled fantasy soon spirals into a dangerously real operation.

Sandwich meets The Wedding People in this irresistible comedy of manners as three generations of a family—a snail scientist, a soon-to-be divorcée, her teenage daughter, a hapless con man, and their feckless patriarch—descend on a ritzy Lake Michigan vacation island. When the Pickford...

An uncompromising and sensually charged collection from one of the great practitioners of the short story The debut story collection from Los Angeles writer Kate Braverman assembles a vivid patchwork of interconnected narratives set in Southern California. Through brief, often haunting snapshots...

From the incendiary voice behind Your Driver is Waiting, a fierce and unforgettable novel about a Tamil refugee family stealing from corporations to survive until their lives are up-ended by a day-trading scam, threatening what little security they have left. It’s hard to be a teenager at the...

Meet The Nearly Dearly Departed Club. Four random strangers thrown together with only one thing in common. They’re all dead. Or maybe not....

Here's a first-person account of a petty thief, Bex. He's a bit of a geezer, who, with long-time partner-in-crime Ollie, just about gets by on the money he makes from house-breaking in small-time suburbia. Bex talks and walks us through a dozen noteworthy jobs and give us his thoughts on life, love and nicking. Includes an exclusive recorded interview with the author.

A small-town Southern Missouri beauty (if she does say so herself), Hollister has an uncanny knack for accidentally robbing banks, convenience stores, and possibly even a drug cartel. Toss in a couple of grand theft autos—purely by accident, of course—but she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not even when Ruger falls into her lap. Savvy, self-taught, and eternally optimistic, Hollister hitchhikes, runs, and drives her way across America’s heartland, stumbling into one misadventure after another.

Billions of dollars on the line. One irresistible distraction. Adelina Choi is a hacker with a heart of gold and a talent for emptying bank accounts. An MIT dropout with Robin Hood tendencies, she funnels cash from greedy marks to those who need it most. It’s a simple gig . . . until she...

When an orangutan goes on the lam, anything can happen. Chasing Harpo is an intriguing cast of quirky characters you'd like to visit with longer. Including the star, Harpo, an orangutan who believes humans are here purely for his entertainment and, of course, to deliver his food. A fun ride and a great adventure for all ages, as Harpo and his trusty servant, Carl, try to outwit the zoo security team, the police, the attorney general, and a gang of drug dealers.

The world you know is a lie. Global events are controlled by the Elders of Zion. And David Zelig wants to join them. There’s only one problem. The Elders of Zion doesn’t exist. It never did. So David rolls his own secret society. But he’s not the only player in town. Clandestine forces are closing in on every side. The race for survival launches David and his friends from the skyscrapers of Manhattan through the secrets of Imperial Russia to an embarrassing relic from the dawn of Christianity.

The beautifully presented villages of East and West Barton are fierce rivals in The Best Kept Village Competition. When wanton acts of vandalism to both villages mysteriously start to occur, suspicions begin to arise. As the hapless Sergeant Richards is reluctantly drafted in for a full police investigation, so the destruction gets ever more extreme. Mayhem ensues when both village committees, headed up respectively by the fiery Brigadier Faraday and the icy Cynthia Barrington-Smythe, decide to act.

A ruthless gang. A corrupt government. A detective in search of the truth. A vigilante with a few screws loose…okay, maybe more than a few. Alex Wagner didn’t come to Hampton looking for trouble—but it sure as hell found him the day he crossed paths with Randy. Randy isn’t your ordinary vigilante. He’s a lethally trained ex-intelligence operative on a mission from God—that is, according to him, anyway. By day, he goes undercover as a drifter in threadbare disguise. By night, he lurks in Hampton’s shadows, pursuing his own warped version of justice.

A contemporary dystopian elegy narrated by a cat imprisoned in a Schrödinger’s box, by the prizing-winning poet and memoirist whose writing "cuts to the core with electrifying force" (The Free-Lance Star). The indelible cat heroine of this unexpected tale recalls her life with “the Mustache...

The name’s Jett Turner and my early retirement to a lake on the Texas–Mexico border was supposed to be fun and easy going. It didn’t involve me writing up the twisted exploits of the head of the Acuña Cartel, reporting such to the DEA, or watching pandas blow up, people being fed to tigers, or learning about the bodily functions of the tortured.

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Lawrence Block returns with the extraordinary Bernie Rhodenbarr. Antiquarian bookseller by day, burglar by night, Bernie has an innate knack, a gift, for getting into places designed to keep him out. Bernie is a gentleman who knows and loves his...

The latest roaring, rollicking adventure from Edgar Award-winner Joe R. Lansdale, featuring odd-couple P.I.s Hap and Leonard. Hap and Leonard are an unlikely pair--Hap, a self-proclaimed white trash rebel, and Leonard--a tough-as-nails Black, gay, Vietnam vet and Republican--but they're the...

Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender has a rule about never taking a job that pays too well: In the criminal underworld, if you’re offered more money than a job is worth, someone is going to end up dead. But he’s bending his rule this one time because he and his girlfriend, Ronnie, are in desperate need of cash to hire a kidnapper to snatch Ronnie’s two-year-old son back from her ex. The whole thing is pretty complicated and has Junior on edge.

Summer 1989: Gunther Fahnstiel, once a tough cop who wasn't averse to taking a little side money from a certain madam, has just escaped the dementia ward of his Wichita nursing home. He's not exactly sure where he wants to go, but wherever it is, it has to do with the bag full of cash belonging to the man he accidentally backed over with his RV in 1979. During his search, Gunther begins to relive the violent fallout of that madam's sex lottery 40 years ago. As Gunther's memories unravel, his past and present will collide in a devastating reckoning.