Noir Mystery Thriller Suspense

In keeping with the Akashic Noir series tradition, each story in Boston Noir is set in a different neighborhood of the city - the impressively diverse collection extends from Roxbury to Cambridge, from Southie to the Boston Harbor, and all stops in between. Lehane's own contribution - the longest story in the volume - is set in his beloved home neighborhood of Dorchester and showcases his phenomenal ability to grip the heart, soul, and throat of the reader.

Picking up the story with Baer on the road to North Carolina and Tat and Corazon in the motel with the hot tub, disaster is moments away. Baer, audiobook number six, is packed with more action, wit, and destruction than any audiobook in the series so far. It's more brutal, more funny, more heartbreaking, and more enlightening.

Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s.

Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara hit it off in prison, where they were both doing time for grand theft auto. Now that they're out, they're joining forces for one big score. The plan is to kidnap the wife of a wealthy Detroit developer and hold her for ransom. But they didn't figure the lowlife husband wouldn't want his lady back. So it's time for Plan B and the opportunity to make a real killing - with the unlikely help of a beautiful, ticked-off housewife who's hungry for a large helping of sweet revenge.

The year is 2008. Reza Malek’s life is modest but manageable - he lives in a small apartment in Harlem, teaches at a local university, and is relieved to be far from the blood and turmoil of Iraq and Afghanistan, where he worked as a reporter, interpreter, and sometimes lover for a superstar journalist who has long since moved on to more remarkable men.

Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt”, he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends.

DCI Harry Grimm is weary of humanity’s evil. Dragged to the middle of nowhere during the darkest of hours, he’s enraged by grisly evidence of a horrific illegal dog fight. And when the mutilated remains turn out to be a gamekeeper’s stolen pet, the gritty detective senses he has a solid lead after learning of a long-running feud. Immediately putting his team on the case, Grimm worries the stakes may be escalating when the animal’s owner is beaten and left for dead.

Ari Thor returns to investigate a chilling series of crimes that are rooted in tragic events from the past. Siglufjörður: an idyllically quiet fishing village on the northernmost tip of Iceland, accessible only via a small mountain tunnel. Ari Thór Arason: a local policeman whose tumultuous past and uneasy relationships with the villagers continue to haunt him.

For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can't refuse.The 200-year-old godfather of the Budayeen's underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.

In a sleepy Devon village, a woman is taken from the streets. Local vet Jenny is horrified. This kind of thing doesn’t happen here. But it’s not the first time she’s been so close to a crime scene. The daughter of a prolific serial killer, she’s spent her whole life running from who she really is. And the crime is harrowingly similar to those her father committed all those years ago.

Murder is nothing new in the Depression-era city, especially to war veterans Inspector Jimmy Dreghorn and his partner ‘Bonnie’ Archie McDaid. But the dead man found in a narrowboat on the Forth and Clyde Canal, executed with a single shot to the back of the head, is no ordinary killing. Violence usually erupts in the heat of the moment – the razor-gangs that stalk the streets settle scores with knives and fists. Firearms suggest something more sinister, especially when the killer strikes again.

Boston blueblood Charlotte Vale has led an unhappy, sheltered life. Lonely, dowdy, repressed, and pushing 40, Charlotte finds salvation at a sanitarium, where she undergoes an emotional and physical transformation. After her extreme makeover, the new Charlotte tests her mettle by embarking on a cruise and finds herself in a torrid love affair with a married man which ends at the conclusion of the voyage. But only then can the real journey begin, as Charlotte is forced to navigate a new life for herself.

Fuminori Nakamura's Akutagawa Prize-winner plunges us into the depths of a young man's winding, troubled psyche. An unnamed taxi driver in Tokyo has experienced a rupture in his everyday life. He cannot stop daydreaming of suicide, envisioning himself returning to the earth in what soon become terrifying blackout episodes. His live-in girlfriend, Sayuko, is in a similarly bad phase, surrendering to alcoholism to escape the memory of her miscarriage.

In Ostia, a depressed coastal settlement 20 miles from the powerful and corrupt city of Rome, a mighty local crime family, the Mafia, corrupt politicians, and new rabid criminal elements battle each other for a billion-dollar payoff. During the final days of Silvio Berlusconi's reign, a massive development proposal that will turn Ostia into a gambling paradise, a Las Vegas on the Mediterranean, is winding its way through the Italian legislature thanks to the sponsorship of politicians in the pay of crime syndicates with vested interests.

Brand-new stories by: Tom Abrahams, Robert Boswell, Sarah Cortez, Anton DiSclafani, Stephanie Jaye Evans, Wanjiku Wa Ngugi, Adrienne Perry, Pia Pico, Reyes Ramirez, Icess Fernandez Rojas, Sehba Sarwar, Leslie Contreras Schwartz, Larry Watts, and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton.

When Rudd, a troubled teenager, embarks on a school research project, he runs across the secret Mormon ritual of blood sacrifice and its role in a 1902 murder committed by the grandson of Brigham Young. Along with his newly discovered half brother, Rudd becomes swept up in the psychological and atavistic effects of this violent, antique ritual. As the past and the present become an increasingly tangled knot, Rudd is found—with minor injuries and few memories—at the scene of a multiple murder on a remote campsite.

Denise Hamilton writes the Eve Diamond series. Her books have been shortlisted for the Edgar, Macavity, Anthony, and Willa Cather awards. The Los Angeles Times named Last Lullaby a Best Book of 2004, and it was also a USA Today Summer Pick and a finalist for a Southern California Booksellers Association 2004 award.

From the introduction by Les Standiford: "The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced. The poet Richard Hugo once said that the natural place for the writer was on the edge, and 'edge' might well be the definitive word when it comes to this city... We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island's heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the 20th century.

The crime fiction canopy's a broad one, with room to give shelter to writing of all sorts, as editor Lawrence Block shows with At Home in the Dark.

Jun Nakayama was a silent-film star in the early days of Hollywood. By 1964, he is living in complete obscurity, until a young writer, Nick Bellinger, tracks him down for an interview. When Bellinger reveals that he has written a screenplay with Nakayama in mind, Jun is intrigued by the possibility of returning to movies. But he begins to worry that someone might delve too deeply into the past and uncover the events that abruptly ended his career in 1922. Like the changing social and racial tides in California - and the unsolved murder of his favorite director.