Dark Humor Mystery

Struggling romance writer and recent divorcée Marcy Jo Codburn feels like a failure. She’s green with author envy and longing for a book deal, a launch party with cupcakes, and the admiration of her daughter. But her dream of literary success is fading faster than her beige hair dye. Then she witnesses celebrated author Francesca Barber in a compromising position, and Marcy sees her chance. Transforming into Summer Branigan, her bolder, blonder pen name, she leverages Francesca’s secret to secure the ultimate coauthor.

A satire of teenage life follows cynical soon-to-graduate Flannery Culp on a raucous journey through high school in the 1990s, covering SATs, college applications, friends, boyfriends, tabloid journalism, and TV talk shows. A first novel.

It's hard to find work as a doctor when using your real name will get you killed. So hard that when a reclusive billionaire offers Dr. Peter Brown, aka Pietro Brnwa, a job accompanying a sexy but self-destructive paleontologist on the world's worst field assignment, Brown has no real choice but to say yes. Even if it means that an army of murderers, mobsters, and international drug dealers-not to mention the occasional lake monster-are about to have a serious Pietro Brnwa problem.

Sixteen-year-old Bianca Torre is an avid birder undergoing a gender identity crisis and grappling with an ever-growing list of fears. Some, like Fear #6: Initiating Conversation, keep them constrained, forcing them to watch birds from the telescope in their bedroom.

Once a cancer patient, former Orlando detective Mike Garrity is a survivor—for now, at least. Death has a way of following him around, like a black cloud over his head. If its not his own mortality he's thinking about, its someone else's. Like his teenage daughter's friend who just died of a suspected suicide. Or the woman he just met in his cancer support group, Debbie, who learns that she doesn't have much longer to live.

Sarah and Sam have lost the very spark that brought them together. In an effort to save their marriage, they embark on an anniversary trip to the Maldives where a week at a luxury resort might remind them of why they fell in love. On the plane, they meet Krista and Kevin, a happy older, exceptionally generous couple headed to the same destination and eager to make vacation friends. They could be just the marriage mentors Sarah and Sam need.

Welcome to Pay to Stay, Los Angeles’ premier minimum-security facility where the privileged serve time Friday to Monday only. But this New Year’s weekend, seven inmates—including a driven campaign manager, a disgraced nurse, a party girl, and one mysterious male transfer—discover their abusive guard dead, wrapped in an ironic “Community Payback” vest. Now they must solve his murder before their cushy arrangement becomes a permanent stay in maximum security.

Dove Connolly is dead. That’s not good for anyone in Tullyanna, never mind Dove. Now his best friend, Sharkey, is home asking awkward questions about Dove’s death, about the strange graphic novel he left behind and, most of all, about Sandra. Sandra Mohan. Missing now for more than a decade, whereabouts unknown. This, however, is a town dead-set on keeping its secrets. And Sharkey is already drawing attention from all the wrong quarters.

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.

On November 9, 1989, Bernd Zeiger, a Stasi officer in the twilight of his career, is deteriorating from a mysterious illness. Alarmed by the disappearance of Lara, a young waitress at his regular café with whom he is obsessed, he chases a series of clues throughout Berlin. The details of Lara’s vanishing trigger flashbacks to his entanglement with Johannes Held, a physicist who, 25 years earlier, infiltrated an American research institute dedicated to weaponizing the paranormal.

When Agatha Benedict plucked Kelly off the city streets to replace her dead cat Poopsie, she neglected to inform him of some very important house traditions. The history of the Benedict Estate prescribes that once the estate owner passes on, a will reading is to take place. However, the reading is more than passing on a loved one's final wishes: it's a figurative gunshot into the air, an alert to all in attendance that a playful game of anything-goes murder has begun. The prize? The inheritance, of course.

Henry, a New Yorker left destitute by circumstance and obsession, is plucked from vagrancy by a shadowy outfit whose primary business is arranging for staged murders of anxiety-ridden clients unhinged by the “events downtown” and seeking to experience - and live through - their own carefully executed assassinations. When Henry joins this nefarious crew, which includes a beautiful blonde tattooist named Tulip, contortionist twins, and a woman referred to only as “the knockout”, he becomes inextricably linked to its ringleader, the mysterious herring connoisseur Mr. Kindt.

Nicht nur für Schottland-Liebhaber sondern auch für alle Fans von Spannung mit einem guten Schuss schwarzen Humors: Nachdem sie einen richtig großen Job versaut haben, bleibt drei Glasgower Auftragskillern nur die Flucht auf die karge und schöne Hebriden-Insel Jura, getarnt als Outdoor-Touristen. Ihre Tarnung fliegt auf, doch Juras eigenbrötlerische Einwohner zeigen sich gesprächsbereit; schließlich gilt es zu verhindern, dass ein Milliardär die Insel in einen Golfclub verwandelt.

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.

נל ליישון, מחברת רב המכר ״צבע החלב״, מכניסה אותנו ברומן זה לראשו של גארי – כייס, פורץ, גנב. במונולוג כובש, שזור הומור עדין, לוקח אותנו גארי לטיול במשעול חייו, החל מילדותו המקופחת, המוזנחת, בלונדון, שם נולד לאם אלכוהוליסטית ול׳אב במשרה חלקית׳ שמתפרנס מעבירות קטנות. לילה אחד הוא לוקח את גארי איתו ומכיר לו את עולם הפשע. במהרה מתברר כי לגארי יש כישרון מיוחד, ויכולותיו של הבן עולות על אלה של האב. לגארי יש חושים כמעט על-אנושיים; בעזרת אינטליגנציה יוצאת דופן ועיניים כחולות בלתי נשכחות, גארי מצליח לצלול לראשם של אנשים סביבו ולהתל בהם כרצונו.

The graduation trip of a lifetime comes with deadly consequences. For six friends, two weeks at a sprawling mansion on a private island in the Caribbean seems like a dream come true. But it's more like a nightmare. Welcome to La Isla del Cordero: a private paradise for the ultra-rich—and the setting for a darkly comic, twist-filled tale of secrets, sabotage, and scandal.

Manche Menschen liebt man oder hasst man – auf June trifft beides gleichzeitig zu. June Mayberry ist in einer beschissenen Lage: Ihre aus einer Alkohollaune heraus gegründete Detektei kommt nicht richtig in Schwung, zu ihrem pubertierenden Sohn, den sie nur einmal die Woche sieht, fehlt ihr jeder Zugang, und mit der verschwundenen Lehrerin, mit deren Suche sie beauftragt wird, war sie wenige Wochen zuvor noch im Bett.

President Robert Thompson, ensnared in a fetish-related scandal and facing imminent impeachment, fakes his own assassination with the help of his ambitious wife and psychiatrist. His goal? To secure his legacy and vanish to an island. This satirical tale follows Thompson’s transformation from disgraced politician to mythic hero. As story plot unfolds, his psychiatrist, Petros Andros (Pete), finds himself entangled in a web of deceit, obsession, and indiscretions of his own.

The night world of Old Town, Portland, Oregon, has gone mad in the grip of gentrification, and at the center of it all is Lucky Supreme, a seedy tattoo parlor, whose proprietor is a street-bred artist with a unique approach to problem solving. Darby Holland has enough on his radar, but when some flash (tattoo artwork) stolen from him resurfaces in California, he can't help himself. His efforts to reclaim it set him on a dangerous path, dragging along his delightfully eccentric colleagues.

When I wrote Money Talks back in 2007, neither I nor anyone else imagined that the White House would soon be occupied by a man who bears such a striking and in fact uncanny resemblance to my villain, Robert Maxx. I wasn't trying to write a predictive dystopia; all I wanted to do was to tell an engaging story that would let me think my way into the mind of a real-estate mogul with a bullying manner, a head of hair flamboyant enough to match his ego, and a somewhat childish fixation to see his name on very tall buildings.