Noir Fiction

April Lavery has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a trail-blazer in the deeply conservative and highly patriarchal society of 1950s Dublin. Though her family is one of the most respected in the city, she is known for being independent-minded; her taste in men, for instance, is decidedly unconventional, as evidenced by her current boyfriend, a handsome and charismatic medical student from Nigeria.

When two men meet in the gym - the ex-boxer Billy Tully and the novice Ernie Munger - their brief sparring session sets into motion their hidden fates, initiating young Munger into the "company of men" and luring Tully back into training. Fat City tells of their anxieties and hopes, their loves and losses, and the stubborn determination of their manager, Ruben Luna, who knows that even the most promising kid is likely to fall prey to some weakness.

In noir master Raymond Chandler's Playback, Philip Marlowe is hired by an influential lawyer he's never heard of to tail a gorgeous redhead but then decides he'd rather help out the redhead. She's been acquitted of her alcoholic husband's murder, but her father-in-law prefers not to take the court's word for it.

Beneath the glitter of Mardi Gras lies the sleaze of Bourbon Street; under the celestial sounds of JazzFest, the nightmare screams of a city once at war within its neighborhoods, but after Hurricane Katrina, seemingly at war with nature and the rest of the country as well. New Orleans is a third world country in itself, a Latin, African, European (and often amoral) culture trapped in a Puritan nation.

Il n'est pas toujours facile de suivre les traces de son père... Le jeune Lorkin, fils du haut seigneur Akkarin, en fait l'apprentissage. Bien déterminé à se montrer à la hauteur de son héritage héroïque, il se porte volontaire pour servir d'assistant au nouvel ambassadeur de la Guilde au Sachaka. Mais il ne tarde pas à être confronté à de sérieux ennuis.

Une nuit pas très paisible de 1749 dans un cimetière parisien... Le corps d'une jeune fille est retrouvé sur une tombe, sans doute sacrifiée lors d'un rituel sataniste. Pas de suspect et pour seuls indices : une hostie, un crucifix et cinq empreintes de pas. Sartine, le lieutenant général de police, craint une résurgence des messes noires sous le règne du très contesté Louis XV... Toujours aussi mal vus du pouvoir en place, le commissaire aux morts étranges et son non moins étrange compagnon, le moine hérétique, explorent la part d'ombre du siècle des Lumières.

In the stories of Havana Noir, current and former residents of the city - some international sensations such as Leonardo Padura, others exciting new voices like Yohamna Despestre - uncover crimes of violence and loveless sex, of mental cruelty and greed, of self-preservation and collective hysteria.

Gifted with an uncanny sense about people, psychologist Miri Fox works as an on-and-off profiler for the police. So when they think they've finally nailed the "Wedding Killer", she agrees to check him out, using her gift to discover the truth. But the suspect, Quentin Black, isn't anything like Miri expects. He claims to be hunting the killer, too. When he confronts her about the nature of her peculiar "insight", Miri gets pulled into Black's bizarre world and embroiled in a game of cat and mouse with a deadly killer - who might just be Black himself.

Reflecting a city still divided, Belfast Noir serves as a record of a city transitioning to normalcy, or perhaps as a warning that underneath the fragile peace darker forces still lurk. Featuring brand-new stories by: Glenn Patterson, Eoin McNamee, Garbhan Downey, Lee Child, Alex Barclay, Brian McGilloway, Ian McDonald, Arlene Hunt, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Claire McGowan, Steve Cavanagh, Lucy Caldwell, Sam Millar, and Gerard Brennan.

Everyone knew the kind of girl Jean Timberlake was: wild, looking for trouble. But she certainly wasn't looking for murder. She was found dead on the beach 17 years ago, and an ex-boyfriend named Bailey Fowler was convicted of her murder and imprisoned, and then escaped. Now private eye Kinsey Millhone steps into a case that should have never been closed, in a town where there's no such thing as a private investigation.

Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness. A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett invented the noir crime novel.

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.

What marks life in Addis Ababa are the starkly different realities coexisting in one place. It's a growing city taking shape beneath the fraught weight of history, myth, and memory. It is a heady mix. It can also be disorienting, and it is in this space that the stories of Addis Ababa Noir reside....

La France de 1834 est une poudrière. Sourde à la colère du peuple, la monarchie réprime de plus en plus durement les émeutes qui gagnent le pays. À Paris, au milieu de la nuit du 14 avril, l'armée abat les habitants d'un immeuble situé au 12 de la rue Transnonain. Un repaire d'insurgés ? Les victimes sont pourtant des vieillards, des femmes, des enfants… Une paire de bas gît au fond d'un des lits taché de sang ; ils appartiennent à une fille des rues portée disparue. Elle sait. Le préfet de police lance l'agent Joseph Lutz sur sa trace.

Mick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on a leave that is almost done. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren’t getting along. His sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case, and local politicians are pushing for city police or the FBI to take it over. Are they convinced she can’t handle it, or is there something else at work? She calls on Mick, who, with his homicide investigation experience and familiarity with the terrain, is well-suited to staying under the radar.

Archie Goodwin’s aunt Edna is about to lure him away from his work at Nero Wolfe’s New York brownstone. After a phone call, he heads off to Ohio, where the president of Farmer’s State Bank and Trust, an elderly widower, has died in an apparent suicide. But Archie’s aunt has expressed nagging suspicions - which only grow stronger when someone takes a shot at a local reporter who wrote about the case.

While on special assignment to the bank fraud unit, Texas Ranger Faith McClellan accidentally stumbles upon a raging fire consuming the back of a nearby house. When partially cremated remains are pulled from the ruins, she finds herself back on homicide - and on the trail of a ruthless killer. As she races to identify the victims, the sadistic murderer strikes again - this time against state politicians with ties to Faith’s father, a former governor of Texas.

A multicultural nexus, Toronto hosts Indian, Portuguese, African, Italian, and Chinese communities that provide fertile backdrops for Toronto Noir's corrosive exposés. Features brand-new stories by RM Vaughan, Nathan Sellyn, Ibi Kaslik, Peter Robinson, Heather Birrell, Sean Dixon, Raywat Deonandad, Christine Murray, Gail Bowen, Emily Schultz, Andrew Pyper, Kim Moritsugu, Mark Sinnet, George Elliott Clarke, Pasha Malla, and Michael Redhill.

Witnessed by a throng of gaping spectators, a charismatic Marine sergeant is murdered under a Bangkok bridge inside a bolted-shut Mercedes Benz. Among the witnesses are the only two cops in the city not on the take, but within moments one is murdered and his partner, Sonchai Jitpleecheep - a devout Buddhist and the son of a Thai bar girl and a long-gone Vietnam War G.I. - is hell-bent on wreaking revenge. On a vigilante mission to capture his partner’s murderer, Sonchai is begrudgingly paired with a beautiful FBI agent named Jones....

"Tu vas promener Bello à cette heure ? demanda Monika, surprise. - Oui, juste une petite promenade. - Vas-y avec Janus. Je n'aime pas te savoir toute seule. Il se fait tard. - Non, je n'ai pas envie d'y aller avec Janus. Il est trop bête !"