Noir Mystery Thriller

In the shadowed city of Dunsmore, where secrets bleed through the cracks of old theaters and the spotlight hides more than it reveals, private investigator Thomas Kaine thought he’d seen the worst the stage could offer. But when a cursed revival of Dracula draws blood from its cast and whispers of a forgotten fire resurface, Kaine and his sharp-witted partner Lana Drexler are pulled into a world where the line between performance and ritual blurs.

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Never before in audio, these vintage stories are the darkest of the dark, and the best of the best.

Crime fiction fans old and new will delight in rediscovering these taut, character-rich, heart-stopping tales, now on audio for the first time.

Two detectives. Two identical women. One dead body—rapidly becoming two, then three, then four. All knotted up in Japan’s underground BDSM scene and kinbaku, a form of rope bondage which bears a complex cultural history of spirituality, torture, cleansing, and sacrifice. As Togashi, a junior member of the police force, investigates the murder of a kinbaku instructor, he finds himself unable to resist his own private transgressive desires. In contrast, Togashi’s colleague Hayama is morally upright to a fault, with a stalwart commitment to the truth.

A horrifying incident from long ago has grisly repercussions that spread across Charleston like a deadly cancer...Then comes the payback: A brutal murder...then another...and another. Homicide cops Nick Janzek and his partner, Delvin Rhett, barely have time to sink their teeth into the first murder, when they’re called to the next gruesome crime scene... And when Janzek finally figures it all out and is about to take down the killer, the killer comes after him...with a vengeance and a very sharp knife.

A crossroads for the people of Europe and the Mediterranean, Marseille is a city that does not discriminate. It embodies the down-and-dirty, tough-guy side of France, but what it lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in spirit. Still, in its shadows lurks a not-so-distant darkness....

On a snowy winter morning, an abandoned shipping container is discovered near Reykjavík. Inside are the bodies of five young women - one of them barely alive. As Icelandic Police detective Daníel struggles to investigate the most brutal crime of his career, Áróra looks into the background of a suspicious man, who turns out to be engaged to Daníel's former wife, and the connections don't stop there.

Something deadly is lurking in the swampy marshes of Moody Bog. For Kylie Strange, it just means more deaths she's responsible for since she's the one who accidentally unleashed a Pandora's box of horrors. She opened the Booke of the Hidden, and now she must do everything she can to close it for good, taking on every monster it releases with the help of the local coven. This time, the Booke has unleashed not one but two demons on the village. With her attention divided, Kylie and her coven of Wiccans are open to attack. But those aren't the only demons on Kylie's mind.

A man shoots his young wife to death. He drives to a freeway overpass, gets out, shoots himself, and drops 100 feet to the freeway below, crushing a Toyota Camry. Inside is an elementary school teacher named Jacqueline Dwyer, who dies at the scene. Ty Buchanan is a hotshot lawyer. Jacqueline Dwyer was the woman he was going to marry. Ty goes into a tailspin. And it gets worse when a mysterious man finds him at the funeral and says Jacqueline's death may not have been an accident after all.

When northern California's idyllic Napa Valley is shattered by the vineyard shooting deaths of two men, investigative-reporter-turned-wine-editor Dante Rath seizes the chance to salvage his sagging career. One of the dead is the winery's top investor, a high-tech genius, who was shot and killed by the winery's owner, who in turn was gunned down by Napa County sheriff deputies. At the murder scene, Dante encounters Carmen Carelli, the lawyer for the deceased investor and whose case files he rifles after sharing wine and other pleasures.

It's 1997. Scarclaw Fell. The body of teenager Tom Jeffries is found at an outward bound centre. Verdict? Misadventure. But not everyone is convinced. And the truth of what happened in the beautiful but eerie fell is locked in the memories of the tight-knit group of friends who took that fateful trip and the flimsy testimony of those living nearby.

A glamorous woman suddenly turns up dead in the middle of nowhere in a tragic, mysterious puzzle that only Georges Simenon’s legendary detective can solve. It’s just another slow, rainy day on a French canal, until the discovery of a woman’s body disrupts the placid scene. Inspector...

Even spies need a vacation. Paris. Amsterdam. Vienna. But what happens when the president's top asset, the warriors of the Jefferson Group, get taken by surprise as they enjoy their well-earned time off in Europe? Not only does the enemy want to wipe out the Jefferson Group, they're also plotting to harpoon the president before the November election. Will Cal Stokes and his team escape the enemy's net, and will the president survive the election?

Woody was working on getting high when the phone rang. Dennis was on a date - it was a date he paid for, but a date all the same. Os had blood on his hands from a little extracurricular law enforcement. All three men picked up their phones because they were cops, and cops are never really off-duty - not even when they’re crooked. Detective Julie Owen was savagely killed in her own bed, and the unborn child she was carrying is nowhere to be found. The grisly crime has the brass breathing down the necks of the three detectives tasked with finding Julie’s killer.

Where does a hit man draw the line? With a controversial presidential election just weeks away, Quarry is hired to carry out a rare political assignment: kill the Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd, a passionate civil rights crusader and campaigner for the underdog candidate. But when a hate group out of Ferguson, Missouri, turns out to be gunning for the same target, Quarry starts to wonder just who it is he's working for.

In a dimly lit apartment building, where shadowy figures come and go, a man has been killed in Georges Simenon’s The Shadow Puppet. On the dimly lit Place des Vosges, Maigret hears the sound of a woman in distress. But this is no crime; she is giving birth in a room above. The lights of the...

Although the Green Dolphin is a bar of ill repute, it is there that Tancred Palmieri, a thief with elegant and erudite tastes, meets Willow Azarian, an aging heroin addict. She reveals to Tancred that her very wealthy father has recently passed away, leaving each of his five children a mysterious object that provides one clue to the whereabouts of a large inheritance. Willow enlists Tancred to steal these objects from her siblings and solve the puzzle.

Eddie's on his way back from a routine investigation when his horse almost runs down a half-naked blonde in serious trouble. Against his better judgment, he promises to protect the frightened young woman, only to find himself waylaid by unknown assailants and left for dead beside her mutilated body.

Sorenson, Wisconsin's deputy coroner, Mattie Winston, is back on the job...in a nursing home examining the body of Bernie Chase - the now former president of the Twilight Home's board of directors - who is covered in a powder used to turn liquids to solids. The home's residents are certain Bernie was offing the patients who cost him too much...and the patient who found him can't remember a thing.

Professional ballerina Thea Ross’s world shatters when her screen-legend father commits suicide, leaving behind a shocking confession to a decades-old murder. Determined to uncover the truth, Thea teams up with a relentless journalist, following a trail of clues that leads her back to the glittering yet treacherous world of 1930s Hollywood. There, she discovers the story of Lorelei Davies, a struggling actress willing to endure anything for her family’s sake.

A country town, a brutal murder, a shameful past, a reckoning to come... The injustices of the past and dangers of the present envelop Aboriginal policewoman Renee Taylor, when her unwilling return to the small outback town of her childhood plunges her into the investigation of a brutal murder...