Comedy Mystery Thrillers

Fred Van Lente's brilliant debut is both an homage to the Golden Age of Mystery and a thoroughly contemporary show-business satire. As the story opens, nine comedians of various acclaim are summoned to the island retreat of legendary Hollywood funnyman Dustin Walker. The group includes a former late-night TV host, a washed-up improv instructor, a ridiculously wealthy "blue collar" comic, and a past-her-prime Vegas icon.

In 1962, opportunities are typically few for nice Jewish girls clacking away at ninety words per minute in a newspaper typing pool. Except Judy Greenberg isn’t typical. An aspiring reporter in DC, she’s aiming for journalistic greatness—not finding a husband. Just don’t tell her mother. Then one day she answers her boss’s private line. The message is curiously cryptic. It’s also delivered in a Russian accent. Judy is certain she has stumbled upon a scoop.

It was supposed to be a simple caviar heist. Dortmunder is almost in the building when the alarm sounds, forcing him up the fire escape and onto the roof. He leaps onto the next building, smashing his ankle and landing in the den of the worst kind of creature he can imagine: nuns.

Björn Diemel wird von seiner Frau gezwungen, ein Achtsamkeits-Seminar zu besuchen, um seine Ehe ins Reine zu bringen, sich als guter Vater zu beweisen und die unausgeglichene Work-Life-Balance wieder herzustellen. Denn als erfolgreicher Anwalt hat Björn sehr wenig Zeit für seine Familie. Der Kurs trägt Früchte und Björn kann das Gelernte sogar in seinen Job integrieren, allerdings anders als gedacht. Denn als sein Mandant, ein brutaler und mehr als schuldiger Mafiaboss, beginnt, ihm ernstliche Probleme zu bereiten, bringt er ihn einfach um - und zwar nach allen Regeln der Achtsamkeit.

It’s a slow, steamy summer in New Orleans’ French Quarter, but Franki Amato is busy planning her bridal shower—that is, until a hit-and-run outside a coffee shop gets her PI senses percolating. The victim is linked to crimes at a fancy society wedding in a haunted hotel where Franki’s fiancé’s family is staying. As for the java joint, it’s straight out of a hardboiled detective movie, and there’s something hinky about its walnut liqueur coffee.

Junior Bender is a Los Angeles burglar with a magic touch. Since he first started breaking into houses at age fourteen, he's never once been caught. But now, after twenty-two years building an exemplary career, Junior has been blackmailed by Trey Annunziato, one of the most powerful crime bosses in LA, into acting as a private investigator on the set of Trey's porn venture, which someone keeps sabotaging.

Bob Dillon is a down-on-his-luck exterminator from Queens who just wants to make a killing with his radical new environmentally-friendly pest elimination technique, involving his hybrid assassin bugs (a very real group of insects). But when Bob decides to advertise, his flyer falls into the hands of a European murder-for-hire broker who mistakes Bob for a professional assassin.

The phone hasn't rung for months. Suzy Marshall is discovering that work can be sluggish for an actress over 60 - even for the former star of a 1980s TV series. So when she's offered the plum role of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich, it seems like a godsend. Until, that is, the play is abruptly cancelled in suspicious circumstances, and Suzy is forced to take a job on a cruise ship to get home.

In the aftermath of a family tragedy, an aspiring author is torn between love for her childhood friend and the temptation of a mysterious outsider. Trying to escape the ghosts of her past, she is swept away to a house that breathes, bleeds...and remembers.

Senhor Jose is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death that are his daily routine. But one day, when he comes across the records of an anonymous young woman, something happens to him.

Someone is looking to wreck the nation's economy, and they're spending plenty to do it. With every lead going nowhere, Flynn's most dizzying logic is put to the test.

At the close of the last millennium, Helen Fielding debuted the irrepressible (and blockbuster-bestselling) Bridget Jones. Now, Fielding gives us a sensational new heroine for a new era...Move over 007, a stunning, sexy-and decidedly female-new player has entered the world of international...

Cecil Younger is a man who takes comfort in the absurdity of the universe, and the universe is obliging him when he gets a call from his lawyer and psychiatrist, who offers him a job. A client wants to hire Younger to kill someone. Though common sense tells him murder just isn't a good career move, his finances tell him it can't hurt to meet his potential client, hoping he can succeed in appeasing him - without a dead body.

He schedules everything. And I mean everything. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I took this job. I thought it would be simple - pretend to be Mr. Dane Clark's personal assistant, find the missing blueprints, and get out of the Clark Castle for good. But, somehow this socially awkward, tech-genius billionaire has wormed his way into my heart. And even if we survive this mess, I'm not sure I want to leave.

Lola Pink is in all shades of trouble. Her shop is still under construction, she's sort-of fired from her job, and her hottest date this week is with a microwave burrito. However, when Dane Clark finds himself at the center of a murder investigation, Lola slips on her gorgeous vintage sunglasses and takes the case. She's determined to prove that her sometimes-boss, sometimes-boyfriend is innocent, even if that means dealing with Dane's "charming" parents and planning a "splendid" charity gala in under two weeks.

Which is more powerful: romance or revenge? Mafia princess Angelina Amaro has only ever loved one man - and even that lone affair was never consummated. Why not? Because her would-be lover, Sal Martucci, fled into the Witness Protection Program after ratting out Big Paul, Angelina's father. But when Sal is discovered, a decade later, working as a bartender in Key West, the wildly dysfunctional Amaro clan heads south - one member with love on her mind, the others with murder in their hearts.

Maplemead Castle is crawling with ghosts, and the new owners need them gone. When Melody Bittersweet and the Girls' Ghostbusting Agency arrive on scene, they quickly identify the troublemakers swinging from the chandeliers...literally. A century ago, stunning trapeze artist Britannia Lovell plunged to her death, and has done every night since. But did she really just fall, or was there something more to her demise?

The continuing success of the beloved Mrs. Murphy mystery series is given its proper due with the publication of this 20th-anniversary tale. When a local mechanic gets his odometer turned back—for good—Mary Minor “Harry” Haristeen steps in to investigate. There’s more to the crime than meets the eye, though, and sleuthing cats Mrs. Murphy and Pewter, along with faithful corgi Tee Tucker, do their level best to keep Harry out of harm’s way.

When a suspect explodes mid-interrogation and his office is taken over by an intergalactic despot, undead detective Dan Deadman reckons he's finally hit rock bottom. Banished to a dangerous underground hostel network, Dan becomes embroiled in a mass-murder investigation that will take him from the bowels of Down Here to the depths of the ocean. As the clues run out and the case collapses around him, Dan discovers a sinister plot that could wipe out two whole civilizations, and plunge the planet of Parloo into an endless bloody war.

Mallory Devereaux is known throughout the town of Royal Flush, Louisiana, as a walking disaster, and her luck just got worse. She needs to raise $10,000 in one week to keep the IRS from seizing her adoptive father’s business, where she works as the demolition foreman. When the opportunity to cool cards at her uncle’s casino comes up, Mallory hopes her luck is changing. But when she realizes her uncle has assembled a tournament of criminals, she wonders what she’s stepped in the middle of.