Noir Fiction

From the outside, Essie’s life looks idyllic: a loving husband, a beautiful house in a good neighborhood, and a nearby mother who dotes on her grandchildren. But few of Essie’s friends know her secret shame: that in a moment of maternal despair, she once walked away from her newborn, asleep in her carriage in a park. Disaster was avoided, and Essie got better, but she still fears what lurks inside her, even as her daughter gets older and she has a second baby.

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro's latest client is a prominent Boston psychiatrist running scared from a vengeful Irish mob. The private investigators know something about cold-blooded retribution. Born and bred on the mean streets of blue-collar Dorchester, they've seen the darkness that lives in the hearts of the unfortunate.

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.”

When PI Dave Wakeland is hired by a terminally ill woman to discover the whereabouts of her adopted child, who disappeared as an adult more than a decade earlier, it seems like just another in a string of poor career decisions. Wakeland is a talented private investigator with next to zero business sense. And even though he finds himself with a fancy new office and a corporate-minded partner, he continues to be drawn to cases that are usually impossible to solve and frequently don’t pay. But it turns out this case is worse than usual, even by his standards.

Quint Adler is a small town crime reporter with bigger aspirations. Stuck in a hospital bed on his 40th birthday, he overhears a conversation that arouses his suspicions. Sensing an opportunity, Quint starts his own investigation, bypassing local law enforcement in the process. His inquiries lead him to the scene of a savage murder. And then a second one, even more barbaric in nature.

Still reeling from a brutal dismemberment, detective Kline is forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside a religious cult that takes literally the New Testament idea that you should cut off your hand if it offends you. Armed only with his gun, his wits, and a gift for self-preservation, Kline must navigate a gauntlet of lies, threats, and misinformation. All too soon he discovers that the stakes are higher than he thought and that his survival depends on an act of sheer will.

No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world's great storytellers presents a surprising tale that explores the nature of mystery itself.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft est sans nul doute l'auteur fantastique le plus influent du XXe siècle ? Son imaginaire unique et terrifiant n'a cessé d'inspirer des générations d'écrivains, de cinéastes, d'artistes ou de créateurs d'univers de jeux, de Neil Gaiman à Michel Houellebecq en passant par Metallica. Le mythe de Cthulhu est au cœur de cette œuvre : un panthéon de dieux et d'êtres monstrueux venus du cosmos et de la nuit des temps ressurgissent pour reprendre possession de notre monde

In The Lady in the Lake, hard-boiled crime-fiction master Raymond Chandler brings us the story of a couple of missing wives - one a rich man's and one a poor man's - who have become the objects of Philip Marlowe's investigation. One of them may have gotten a Mexican divorce and married a gigolo, and the other may be dead. Marlowe's not sure he cares about either one, but he's not paid to care.

Murder isn’t uncommon in a big city, but when young women start turning up dead next to mysterious symbols painted in their blood, the police turn to Alex Lockerby to find the killer. Unfortunately, the bloody symbols aren’t any form of magic Alex knows, leaving him precious little to work with and a nagging feeling that he’d better stop this madman before he finishes whatever spell he’s attempting.

"Relativement à la très-étrange et pourtant très-familière histoire que je vais coucher par écrit, je n'attends ni ne sollicite la créance. Vraiment, je serais fou de m'y attendre dans un cas où mes sens eux-mêmes rejettent leur propre témoignage. Cependant, je ne suis pas fou, - et très certainement je ne rêve pas. Mais demain je meurs, et aujourd'hui je voudrais décharger mon âme."

From the pulpy pages of Black Mask Magazine in the 1920s and '30s, through the film noir era of the 1940s, to today, noir fiction has lured many a reader and movie-goer away from the light and into the dark underbelly of society. Names such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain; titles like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Postman Always Rings Twice...these have inhabited our collective consciousness for decades. Humanity, it seems, loves the dark. And within the dark, one figure stands out: that of the femme fatale.

Best-selling authors Jeffery Deaver and Anne Perry join rising stars like Dana Chamblee Carpenter and Paul Gail Benson in a collection that proves Music City is a deadly place to be when your song gets called. Featuring stories by Donald Bain, Robert Dugoni, Jefferson Bass, Mary Burton, Jonathan Stone, Steven James, Maggie Toussaint, Clay Stafford, Heywood Gould, Jaden Terrell, and more....

Do you have any idea what the people you know are capable of? Best-selling author of All My Lies Are True, Dorothy Koomson, asks how well you can really know your neighbours.

Freya vit avec sa meute dans les forêts glaciales de Norvège. Maudite par les dieux nordiques, elle est incapable de se transformer en louve. Contre toute attente, le beau Caïn, héritier d'une puissante meute rivale, devient son allié. Mais leur relation bascule lors d'une terrible nuit qui la force à s'enfuir et abandonner les siens. Comme si être une demi-louve ne suffisait pas, la mort de sa mère, son alpha, ne lui laisse pas le choix. Elle doit retourner sur ses terres, affronter Caïn et prendre les rênes de sa meute.

Detective Easy Rawlins returns in a mystery set in 1961 Los Angeles as Easy accepts a job searching for a beautiful woman nicknamed Black Betty who works as a housekeeper in Beverly Hills.

Mexico in the 1970s is a dangerous country, even for Maite, a secretary who spends her life seeking the romance found in cheap comic books and ignoring the activists protesting around the city. When her next-door neighbor, the beautiful art student Leonora, disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman—and journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of student radicals and dissidents.

When innkeeper Dorthe Hyllested is found murdered, the police are surprised and puzzled to discover a concealed nursery in her upstairs apartment. As far as her friends and family knew, the recently widowed Dorthe was childless—so who lived in this secret toy-strewn room? And more importantly, where is the child now?

Trois femmes vivaient dans un village. La première était méchante, la deuxième était menteuse, la troisième était égoïste. Elles possédaient pourtant un point commun, un secret en quelque sorte : toutes les trois rêvaient de fuir... Le jour paraît sur Giverny. Du haut de son moulin, une vieille dame veille, surveille. Le quotidien du village, les cars de touristes... Des silhouettes et des vies. Deux femmes, en particulier, se détachent : l'une, les yeux couleur nymphéa, rêve d'amour et d'évasion ; l'autre, onze ans, ne vit déjà que pour la peinture.

Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness and determination. She used those attributes to survive a divorce in 1940s America with two children and to claw her way out of poverty, becoming a successful businesswoman. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to her monstrous daughter.