Crime Noir

It's 1918. The war in Europe grinds on, and the Spanish flu seems to be on an insatiable killing spree. But in the small fishing village of Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, a more confined drama-harrowing and provocative-slowly unfolds. It begins when Elizabeth Frame murders her husband hours after their wedding and thrusts the revolver into the blowhole of a beached whale.

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.

The Living. Erlendur works nights. He’s a young officer in Traffic, not yet a detective. And Reykjavik’s nights are full of car crashes, robberies, drinkers and fighters. Sometimes an unexplained death. The Lost. A homeless man Erlendur knows is found drowned. But few people care. Or when a young woman on her way home from a club vanishes. Both cases go cold. The Searcher. Two lost people from two different worlds. Erlendur is not an investigator, but his instincts tell him their fates are worth pursuing.

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.

Fritz Brown’s L.A. - and his life - are masses of contradictions, like stirring chorales sung for the dead. A less-than-spotless former cop with a drinking problem - a private-eye-cum-repo man with a taste for great music - he has been known to wallow in the grime beneath the Hollywood glitter. But Fritz Brown’s life is about to change, thanks to the appearance of a racist psycho who flashes too much cash for a golf caddie and who walked away clean from a multiple murder rap.

A serial killer returns after years of inactivity in this gripping new thriller. The green-paint-bathtub killer had Reacher running blind back in the day. The New York FBI team says Reacher was the serial killer then and is still the serial killer. But FBI agents Kim Otto and Carlos Gaspar believe a copycat may be on the loose....

Seamus Caron is a hard-edged private eye with a troubled past, navigating Toronto’s icy streets and solving mundane cases. When his best friend and homicide chief Sandra Blair’s latest case involves a new drug that’s poisoning users, Seamus races against time to prevent it from spreading and causing more deaths.

"Vêtue d'un pyjama en satin écru, la jeune femme repose dans une baignoire remplie, en position de fœtus inversé. Ses mains et ses chevilles sont étroitement liées derrière son dos et elle flotte encore avec un soupçon de grâce." À Columbia, sur la côte est des Etats-Unis, c'est la scène macabre que découvre le lieutenant Sandino. Officier intègre, c'est aussi un homme brisé depuis la disparition de sa famille.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia: The end of the line. Lawless, drug-soaked, forgotten - it's where bad journalists go to die. For once-great war photographer Will Keller, that's kind of a mission statement: he spends his days floating from one score to the next, taking any job that pays; his nights are a haze of sex, drugs, booze, and brawling. But Will's spiral toward oblivion is interrupted by Kara Saito, a beautiful young woman who shows up and begs Will to help find her sister, June, who disappeared during a stint as an intern at the local paper.

जयंतनगर में छोटे-छोटे बच्चों का क़त्ल हो रहा है, पर क़ातिल का कोई सुराग़ नहीं मिल रहा। पुलिस को लगता है कि ये एंटी-नैशनल लोगों का काम है, जो हिंदू-मुस्लिम एकता को तोड़ना चाह रहे हैं, जिससे जयंतनगर में लॉ एंड ऑर्डर की समस्या खड़ी हो जाए। शहर में NRC और CAA का विरोध हो रहा है। पुलिस को लगता है कि कोई ऐसा आदमी इस सिचुएशन का फ़ायदा उठना चाह रहा है, जिसकी पकड़ हिंदू और मुस्लिम दोनों ग्रूप में है। इधर सुगंधा की शादी को काफ़ी साल हो गए हैं पर उसे अभी तक बच्चा नहीं हुआ, इसलिए वह बच्चा पाने के लिए किसी भी हद तक जाने को तैयार है।

All is quiet in Kurrjakk when Jamie gets a call from an old friend. A family has seemingly vanished in the mountains near the border to the north, and the local polis have turned up nothing. When Jamie and Thorsen arrive in the quiet border town of Etterange, it doesn't take long for them to realise something isn't right. An inept twenty-six-year-old is running the polis station, there's been a spate of unreported missing persons, and there are rumblings of a strange community living out on the lake, shut off from the rest of the world.

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.

When all contact is lost with two Icelanders working in a harsh and sparsely populated area on the northeast coast of Greenland, Thora is hired to investigate. Is there any connection with the woman who vanished from the site some months earlier? Why are the locals so hostile? And could one of the team staying at the site with Thora be responsible for the disappearances?

From the creator, writer, and executive producer of the HBO series True Detective and soon to be a major motion picture comes a dark and visceral novel set along the wastelands of Galveston. On the same day Roy Cady is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he learns that his employer has put a hit out on him. After narrowly escaping an attempt on his life, Cady goes on the run with a young prostitute named Rocky and her three-year-old sister, from New Orleans to Galveston, Texas. But though they run, they cannot hide in this explosive, atmospheric, impossible-to-pause thrill ride.

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. This anthology includes brand-new stories by: Tommy Moore, Jessica Breheny, Naomi Hirahara, Calvin McMillin, Liza Monroy, Elizabeth McKenzie, Jill Wolfson, Ariel Gore, Jon Bailiff, Maceo Montoya, Micah Perks, Seana Graham, Vinnie Hansen, Peggy Townsend, Margaret Elysia Garcia, Lou Mathews, Lee Quarnstrom, Dillon Kaiser, Beth Lisick, and Wallace Baine.

Intrepid Mountie Jack Taggart is hurled into a world where morality, justice, and the legal system are pitted against one another. Taggart investigates the murder of someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wiretap information identifies a shadowy gang member known only as Cocktail as being responsible. Taggart and his partner go undercover to join one of a coalition of gangs who are at war in British Columbia. Their mission is to identify Cocktail and gain evidence to convict him of murder.

In a city full of police controversies, hippie artist punk houses, and overzealous liberals, Portland, Oregon, is a place where even its fiction blurs with its bizarre realities. Brand-new stories by: Gigi Little, Justin Hocking, Christopher Bolton, Jess Walter, Monica Drake, Jamie S. Rich (illustrated by Joelle Jones), Dan DeWeese, Zoe Trope, Luciana Lopez, Karen Karbo, Bill Cameron, Ariel Gore, Floyd Skloot, Megan Kruse, Kimberly Warner-Cohen, and Jonathan Selwood.

Rhoda West is Silicon Valley’s favorite female CEO: the luminously charismatic founder of the fast-growing startup Radical, a wellness company whose core mission is the betterment of women’s lives. Rhoda’s Instagram page offers intimate glimpses of her personal life alongside promotions for the cult-status products developed in the Well, Radical’s secretive lab.

When the police are unable to find a body, they are forced to dismiss a homeless veteran’s claim that he witnessed a homicide. But after he is found murdered in the same spot two days later, DI Bliss and the Major Crime Unit set their sights on catching a ruthless killer. Elsewhere, when the daughter of a cuckooed family is reported to have attempted suicide, Jimmy Bliss and DC Penny Chandler have their doubts and vow to uncover the truth. But the situation is about to get much worse, and violence is certain to erupt on the city streets.

At the age of twenty-four, Griselda Satter lee has already lived two lifetimes. A star of the silver screen, she gives up Hollywood after a year and moves to New York to become a designer. While her ex-husband, Con, is out of town, she is staying in his apartment. Walking back one night, she meets two cheerful young men who want to go home with her - and won't take no for an answer.