Noir City

Great War veteran and rising star Gene Hammons lost his job as a homicide detective when he tried to prove that a woman was wrongly convicted of murder to protect a well-connected man. Now a private investigator, Hammons makes his living looking for missing persons - a plentiful caseload during the Great Depression, when people seem to disappear all the time. But his routine is disrupted when his brother - another homicide detective, still on the force - enlists his help looking into the death of a young woman whose dismembered body is found beside the railroad tracks.

Rudolf Sebestyen is missing, and Marianne Smalls is involved in an illicit affair with the shady Jonas Schmitt. Both cases converge when Dora Urban, Rudolf's beautiful and mysterious half-sister, and Lamont Smalls, Marianne's suspicious husband, hire Jack Mitchell, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking private investigator. Dora wants Jack to uncover what happened to her brother, while Lamont seeks proof of his wife's infidelity. But Dora is a vampire, in a city teeming with creatures of the night. As Jack dives deeper, he discovers that both cases are linked to vepratoga.

Der neue Roman des dreifachen Deutschen-Krimipreis-Trägers. Der Dienst im Außenbezirk sollte Ruhe in das Leben der Kriminalpolizistin Romina Winter bringen. Doch georgische Einbrecher nehmen sich in täglichen Touren die Stadtvillen in Dahlem und Lichterfelde vor. Die Bewohner sind verängstigt. Und dann verschwindet Rominas kleine Schwester. Sie muss in eigener Sache ermitteln. Jacques Lippold wird aus dem Tegeler Gefängnis entlassen. Zwei Jahre hat er wegen Betrugs gesessen. Jetzt will er sich als Finanzberater in der Kunstszene etablieren.

This book does fall into the same universe as my other series of books I call the Noir series. In those books you can hear about the gritty world of detectives, reporters, and gangsters. Well, that world exists here as well except here you have men and women who are willing to work outside of the law on both sides to get a job done. Whereas the other books focus on the aforementioned detectives, private and otherwise, here the focus is more on the ones that hide who they are.

Summer, 1962. A scorching heat wave is suffocating LA. PI Jim Keegan is offered a small fortune to find a beautiful woman from a set of photographs. He refuses; the job seems suspicious. But the next day the same woman, Eve, turns up, unbidden, on his doorstep. Eve fears for her safety. She is being watched. Before Keegan knows it, someone has been killed with Keegan’s own gun, and he gets sucked into a world of suspicion and betrayal where he’s never quite sure where the truth lies....

When crime-fighting attorney Albert Patterson is gunned down in a Phenix City, Alabama, alley in the spring of 1954, the entire town seems to pause for just a moment—and when it starts up again, there is something different about it. A small group of men meet and decide they have had enough, but what that means and where it will take them is something they could not have foreseen.

The road to redemption is a perilous one! Frank Parker is still reeling from the Lenny Marquez Case and is working off his frustrations as a Katsaros enforcer. When Janet Foxx asks him to look into a so-called wrongful conviction, he finds himself trying to prove the innocence of one of Tycho City’s most notorious killers. The case’s broken path soon takes him to the infamous Pandrom Prison, where he’ll come face-to-face with old demons that could change everything and turn him away from his crusade to find his partner’s killer.

Pete Fernandez is a mess. He’s on the brink of being fired from his middle-management newspaper job. His fiancée has up and left him. Now, after the sudden death of his father, he’s back in his hometown of Miami, slowly drinking himself into oblivion. But when a coworker he barely knows asks Pete to locate a missing daughter, Pete finds himself dragged into a tale of murder, drugs, double-crosses, and memories bursting from the black heart of the Miami underworld - and, shockingly, his father’s past.

Family. The job. The thrill of discovery. No one gets out alive...What's a little sin between the sheets, and a little blood between lovers? What's a little death to be discovered, waiting for you under that white sheet? I'm digging a desert grave just for you, underneath the burning sun. You won't be found...not even by the vultures circling in the sky. You, my dear, are the reason why I was always easily influenced.

Kane Kulpa learned which laws could be bent and which broken after a short stint in prison courtesy of Detective Vincent Bayonne. Bound by time, integrity, and the reality of life in Central City, Bayonne and Kane made peace with the past. Now, gang tension spirals from corrupt to deadly, and a series of murders stresses Kane and Bayonne’s uneasy alliance. Kane balances on a razor’s edge to protect his bar, power, life, and family, and Bayonne hustles to keep another lonely man from being strangled.

This first book in a new series is set in and around the Portland, Maine, waterfront. It introduces Brandon Blake, a loner who lives on his old wooden cruiser. Raised by his alcoholic grandmother after his mother was lost at sea, Blake learned to depend on himself. During an assignment for a law-enforcement class, Blake gets involved in a fight and is marked for payback by a soon-to-be-released convict. Meanwhile, questions surface about his mother's disappearance.

Rushmore “Mac” McKenzie has a lot of old girlfriends, but only one went on to marry the current governor of the state of Minnesota. And only one is calling him with a desperate request to meet in secret. First Lady Lindsay Barrett is carrying an anonymous e-mail that contains the makings of an ugly rumor about her husband, the man about to run for higher office - perhaps even the highest office. Someone says they have evidence that Jack Barrett killed his high school sweetheart. Lindsay says it’s an outright lie, but the truth lies buried decades in the past.

James Dual, inspired by the racially integrated punky ska revival in England, starts the ON Klub, a ska, soul, and reggae club at the rough and ready pre-gentrified Silver Lake end of Sunset Blvd. He and partner in crime, Drea Dresden, try their best to make the transition out of the '70s in one piece. A journalist friend brings a mob-related music man connected to Bob Marley to visit the club, who becomes obsessed with the charismatic young Jamaican singer Loraine Sulley, who is performing that night.

Jon Gilligan is the only man with a pulse in a city of the undead. It's his job to maintain order between the factions of walking corpses and disembodied spirits. The workload has been driving him a little insane, leading him to take on the persona of a noir detective. He narrates his adventures, casting himself as a hero to all those under his watch.