Crime City

A man hangs himself in a neighborhood chapel. Bodies of young girls are being found in canals and rivers across the city with high levels of Mandrax in their bloodstream. McCoy is asked to watch over a colleague's niece, who has left home young and is running with a bad crowd in Glasgow. DS Wattie is attempting to become a sergeant. Drugs in Glasgow have gotten darker and more dangerous. Glasgow, its music, and its inhabitants all have rough edges in this hard city fought over by gangs, organized crime, the forces of law and order, and ordinary people trying to get by.

Midcentury Los Angeles: A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America", a land of sunshine and orange groves, Midwestern values, and Hollywood stars, protected by the world's most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men - one L.A.'s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief - each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city.

Writer, journalist and chronicler of justice as it relates to the rich and famous, Gus Bailey, like the movers and shakers of Los Angeles, is drawn into the vortex of the O. J. Simpson trial. By day, he is a fixture at the lawyers, the journalists, the hangers-on, and even the judge. By night, he is courted by the most celebrated hosts, from Kirk Douglas to Heidi Fleiss, from Elizabeth Taylor to Nancy Reagan, who delight in the hottest news from the corridors of the courtroom.

After inheriting a farm on New Zealand’s South Island, Lewis Harding tries his best to keep it running. The financially strapped farmer is forced to forage his new land for implements, eliciting the help of his son Gary. But when they go too close to the entrance of an old deserted gold mine, catastrophe strikes in more ways then one. When Gary’s older brother, Dr. Cecil Harding, shows up at the farm, Nekenhalle, he discovers that his brother and father had gone missing.

The firefighting crew of Engine 99 has spent years rushing fearlessly into the hot zone of major fires across New York City. This tight-knit four-person unit has worked together to save countless lives and stop out of control fires before they cause major destruction. They've also stolen millions from banks, jewelry stores, and art galleries. Under the cover of saving the city, they've used their knowledge and specialist equipment to become the most successful heist crew on the East Coast.

The Cleveland Street scandal, involving a homosexual brothel reputedly visited by the queen's grandson, shocked Victorian Britain in 1889. This is the first full-length account of one of its key players, Jack Saul, a working-class, Irish-Catholic rent boy who worked his way into the upper echelons of the aristocracy, and wrote the notorious pornographic memoir The Sins of the Cities of the Plain.

A madman is holding Vitoria hostage, killing its citizens in brutal ways and staging the bodies. The city's only hope is a brilliant detective struggling to battle his own demons. Inspector Unai López de Ayala, known as "Kraken", is charged with investigating a series of ritualistic murders. The killings are eerily similar to ones that terrorized the citizens of Vitoria 20 years earlier. But back then, police were sure they had discovered the killer, a prestigious archaeologist who is currently in jail.

Cesare Aldo, a former soldier and now an officer of the Renaissance city's most feared criminal court, is given four days to solve the murder: catch the killer before the feast of Epiphany—or suffer the consequences. During his investigations Aldo uncovers a plot to overthrow the volatile ruler of Florence, Alessandro de' Medici. If the duke falls, it will endanger the whole city. But a rival officer of the court is determined to expose details about Aldo’s private life that could lead to his ruin.

The year is 2072, and Deacon City, a metropolis mirroring the restless pulse of modern-day Los Angeles, evolves into a sprawling urban maze where danger lurks at every corner. Time slips by, thirty years since the last Mortal Kombat tournament, yet the city's underbelly still simmers with the embers of old rivalries. For its inhabitants, Deacon City is both a glittering beacon of opportunity and a treacherous pit of vice. Petty crimes and criminal activities have become woven into the fabric of daily life, thriving in the shadowy alleys and neon-lit streets.

During the worst blizzard in memory, an FBI agent in a moving SUV in New York City is killed by a nearly impossible sniper shot. Unable to pinpoint where the shot came from, as the storm rapidly wipes out evidence, the agent-in-charge Brett Kehoe turns to the one man who might be able to help them - former FBI agent Lucas Page. Page, a university professor and best-selling author, left the FBI years ago after a tragic event robbed him of the willingness to continue. Lucas Page has no interest in helping the FBI - except for the fact that the victim was his former partner.

"This was no suicide," says Detective Michael Bennett. A man plunges to his death from the roof of a Manhattan hotel. It looks like a suicide - except the victim has someone else's fingerprints and $10,000 in cash. Enter Detective Michael Bennett. BookShots - lightning-fast stories by James Patterson. Novels you can devour in a few hours, impossible to stop listening, and all original content from James Patterson.

Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike before dawn to deliver newspapers in his suburban Indianapolis neighborhood. He is 12 years old. Somewhere en route, he vanishes without a trace. Crushed by frustrating dead ends and exhausted by a police force that cannot (or will not) find their son, the Gabriels finally stumble upon a name - an elusive private investigator who may represent their last chance for answers.

From its inception, Atlantic City has always been a town dedicated to the fast buck, and this wide-reachinghistory offers a riveting account of its past 100 year, from the city's heyday as a Prohibition-era mecca of lawlessness to its rebirth as a legitimate casino resort in the modern era.

Fall, 1947. New York City. Private Investigator Ida Davis has been called to New York by her old partner, Michael Talbot, to investigate a brutal killing spree in a Harlem flophouse that has left four people dead. But as they delve deeper into the case, Ida and Michael realize the murders are part of a larger conspiracy that stretches further than they ever could have imagined. Meanwhile, Ida’s childhood friend, Louis Armstrong, is at his lowest ebb.

The ruthless mafia king is no stranger to violence, but when he lays his eyes on my bruised and battered face, he's furious. I thought my makeup was thick enough to cover the beating I suffered until my inappropriately flirtatious boss noticed. As a cocktail waitress in his casino, I've always been on Mr. Salvato's radar, but now he's obsessed, demanding to know who hurt me and why, intent on making them suffer.

Newly promoted to detective first-grade with the NYPD, Jane Bauer, is back to work after a nearly fatal run-in with a killer. But while she’s happy to be back on the job, her new assignment - another cold case - seems to hold little promise of being solved. Eight years ago, Anderson Stratton, a schizophrenic, was found dead of starvation in his apartment. Nothing on the scene indicated foul play, and although he left no note, the death was ultimately ruled a suicide.

In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: There were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most perplexing murder.

The woman falls. Her body begins to shake. Her brown eyes turn upwards, showing a mix of panic and desperate hope. She takes a deep breath and says one word: Blake. Then her eyes close, her face pales, and she goes still forever… The victim: Shannon, a woman who went out of her way to help the lost and hopeless, left abandoned to die by the side of the road. Where was she in those last few days before her death, and why was she so frightened?

When a local teenager discovers a severed hand and foot washed up on the shore of the small town of Point Mettier, Alaska, Cara Kennedy is on the case. A detective from Anchorage, she has her own motives for investigating the possible murder in this isolated place, which can be accessed only by a tunnel. After a blizzard causes the tunnel to close indefinitely, Cara is stuck among the odd and suspicious residents of the town—all 205 of whom live in the same high-rise building and are as icy as the weather.

Brand-new stories from David Housewright, Steve Thayer, Judith Guest, Mary Logue, Bruce Rubenstein, K.J. Erickson, William Kent Krueger, Ellen Hart, Brad Zellar, Mary Sharratt, Pete Hautman, Larry Millett, Quinton Skinner, Gary Bush, and Chris Everheart.