Noir Fiction

Henry is a brilliant engineer who, after untold hours spent in his home lab, has achieved the breakthrough of his career—he’s created an artificially intelligent consciousness. He calls the half-formed robot William. No one knows about William. Henry’s agoraphobia keeps him inside the house, and his fixation on his project keeps him up in the attic, away from everyone, including his pregnant wife, Lily.

It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse—and concealing the cause of death.

A dying millionaire hires private eye Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, and Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

A favor for a friend puts Anita Blake in the center of a full-blown scandal that threatens master vampire Jean-Claude's reign - and makes her a pawn in an ancient vampire queen's new rise to power.

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.

Versailles, juillet 2000. Trois amies d'enfance, Capucine, Louise et Emma, se retrouvent dans un bar pour fêter les résultats de leur baccalauréat. Paris, juillet 2012. Capucine reçoit la visite de la brigade criminelle. Son ami, Nathan, vient d'être retrouvé sauvagement assassiné et mutilé dans le parking de la place Vendôme. La lettre P a été gravée à son annulaire gauche et son sexe a disparu. Quelques jours plus tard, Capucine reçoit un mystérieux message : "Nathan n'est plus. Tu as une seconde chance. P.

Quand Samantha accepte l’invitation à une soirée organisée par quatre filles un peu sinistres, elle plonge sans le savoir dans un monde inquiétant, entre le conte de fées et l’histoire d’horreur.

San Francisco, 1947. Bartender Sammy “Two Toes” Tiffin and the rest of the Cookie’s Coffee Irregulars—a ragtag bunch of working mugs last seen in Noir—are on the hustle: they’re trying to open a driving school; shanghai an abusive Swedish stevedore; get Mable, the local madam, and her girls to a Christmas party at the State Hospital without alerting the overzealous head of the S.F.P.D. vice squad.

Desperate to complete the last chapter of his law thesis on workplace dynamics for women to secure his tenure, Professor Stanley Hopkins stumbles on an old close college friend, Donald Johansson, who has plenty of female employees. The problem is that Donald is a porn video king. Taking his wife to California’s seedy city of Burbank to help with taping interviews, Stanley realizes he is in way over his head the moment a leading porn star is brutally killed in Donald’s office during a party.

James Stark, a.k.a. Sandman Slim, crawled out of Hell, took bloody revenge for his girlfriend’s murder, and saved the world along the way. After that, what do you do for an encore? You take a lousy job tracking down monsters for money. It’s a depressing gig, but it pays for your beer and cigarettes. But in L.A., things can always get worse. Like when Lucifer comes to town to supervise his movie biography and drafts Stark as his bodyguard.

Welcome to Maple Street, a picture-perfect slice of suburban Long Island, its residents bound by their children, their work, and their illusion of safety in a rapidly changing world. But menace skulks among this exclusive enclave. When the Wilde family arrive, they trigger their neighbors’ worst fears. Dad Arlo’s a gruff has-been rock star with track marks. Mom Gertie’s got a thick Brooklyn accent, with high heels and tube tops to match. Their weird kids cuss like sailors. They don’t fit with the way Maple Street sees itself.

Les souvenirs, c'est comme les cadavres : tôt ou tard, ils refont surface. Qui est cet homme assis sur la plage en pleine tempête, sur le lieu d'un crime commis vingt ans plus tôt ? Il n'a pas de nom, pas de manteau, et a perdu la mémoire. Alice prend l'inconnu sous son aile et décide de l'héberger, sans savoir qu'il va bouleverser sa vie à jamais. Au même moment, dans la banlieue de Londres, Lily attend en vain le retour de l'homme qu'elle vient d'épouser et dont la police tarde à signaler la disparition. Parviendra-t-elle à retrouver celui pour qui elle a tout abandonné ?

Debauched, divorced, and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days across the American Southwest, he travels from from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father - comedian is the only title Schafer has left. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when the opportunity doesn't come - or worse - it comes and goes?

The last thing Lizzie needs right now is a call from an inmate at Rikers asking for help - even if Zach Grayson is an old friend. But Zach is desperate: His wife, Amanda, has been found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their Brooklyn brownstone. And Zach’s the primary suspect. As Lizzie is drawn into the dark heart of idyllic Park Slope, she learns that Zach and Amanda weren’t what they seemed - and that their friends, a close-knit group of fellow parents at the exclusive Brooklyn Country Day school, might be protecting troubling secrets of their own.

A young hospital security guard with a disturbingly unique taste in women. A maternity doctor with a horrifically unusual appetite. When the two of them meet, they embark on a journey of self-discovery while shattering societal norms and engaging in destructively aberrant behavior. As they unwittingly help each other understand a world in which neither seems to belong, they begin to realize what it truly means to be alive...and that it might not always a good thing.

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam, and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

Daniel Loveless and Charlotte McManus—aka Charlie—have been best friends since forever. Together, they’ve made it through everything from middle school dances to Daniel finding out he had a daughter, and they’re still thick as thieves. Faking an engagement, though? That’s… a lot.

The police are desperate for information on the triple homicide. Detective Joona Linna enlists the help of hypnotist Erik Maria Bark. But when Bark unlocks the secrets in the boy’s memory, he triggers a terrifying chain of events that will put all their lives in jeopardy.

Tough, cynical PI Sam Spade is hired by the story's irresistible femme fatale, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, to locate the client's sister by tailing her companion. Spade's partner, Miles Archer, takes on the assignment, and quickly both he and the man he was shadowing are murdered. As Spade pursues the mystery of his partner's death, he is drawn into a circle of colorful characters - all of them after a legendary statuette of a falcon fashioned long ago for King Charles of Spain.

Sin City. An artificial oasis of pleasure, spectacle, and entertainment, the gambling capital of America has reinvented itself so many times that it's doubtful that anyone knows for sure what's real and what isn't in the miles of neon and scorching heat. Las Vegas is considered the ultimate player's destination, no matter what your game. Las Vegas is the true city that never sleeps, where fortunes are made and lost every day, and where snake-eyes aren't found just on a pair of dice.