Noir Mystery Thriller

Detective Inspector Ruth Hunter has resolved to put the grief of her missing partner behind her and continue to make a life away from London in Snowdonia. When a 16-year-old girl, Rosie, mysteriously vanishes, the case brings up unresolved issues from the past for Ruth. Ruth realises that the key to Rosie’s disappearance might lie within a violent battle for control of a local prison.

Killing Me Softly introduces Key West private eye Gideon Lowry, who moonlights as a piano player at a local jazz club. When Virginia Murphy shows up one night to ask him to investigate her sister's death 40 years earlier, Gideon is led down the darker side of memory lane where secrets linger. Some are buried as deeply as the paradise that was once Key West, now entombed in concrete. Key West's Hemingway Days is in full swing in Night and Day, when Gideon is pulled into the world of a famous nightclub singer known only as Asia.

The eponymous and hapless detective Happy Doll returns with a new philosophy and a new case in this second installment of a series "that's a tightly coiled double helix of offbeat humor and unflinching violence" (New York Times Book Review). Although badly scarred and down to his last kidney...

The streets are about to explode…and Puyallup’s local paranormal investigator Jimmy Kincaid is caught right in the middle of it. The neighborhood’s criminal syndicates are on the brink of all-out war, and if they go at it, the streets will run red—literally. But Jimmy’s got more problems. Someone’s sending him a particular message by sending him severed limbs. And then there’s the hitmen coming after him. Last but not least, he’s got to broker a deal between the biggest elven street gang in Seattle and a vicious Triad gang—and not get himself killed in the bargain.

In this first installment in Georges Simenon’s legendary Inspector Maigret series, M. Maigret hunts down an elusive and notorious confidence man, but finds that identifying him is a game of doubles, intrigue, and hidden crimes. When Detective Chief Inspector Maigret receives notice from...

Insurance mathematician Henri Koskinen has just restored order in his life, as well as in the adventure park he now owns, when a man from the past appears—and turns everything upside down again. More problems arise when the park's equipment supplier is taken over by a shady trio: Why won't Suomen Leikki Ltd sell the new Moose Jump to Henri when he needs it for the park's main attraction? At the same time, Henri's relationship with the artist Laura Helanto is reaching a breaking point.

When Óttar Karlsson, a wealthy and respected government official and businessman, is found murdered, after failing to turn up at his own surprise birthday party, the police are at a loss. It isn't until young police officer Sigurdís finds a well-hidden safe in his impersonal luxury apartment that clues start emerging. As Óttar's shady business dealings become clear, a second unexpected line of enquiry emerges, when Sigurdís finds a US phone number in the safe, along with papers showing regular money transfers to an American account.

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.

The small community of Akranes is devastated after a young man dies in a mysterious house fire. When Detective Elma and her colleagues from West Iceland CID discover the fire was arson, they become embroiled in an increasingly perplexing case. For the dead man's final online search raises fears that they could be investigating not one murder, but two.

A serial killer stalks women in rural Ohio. He is deranged but brilliant, known only by the grotesque nickname the media has given him - The Doll Parts Killer. The name is apt. He dismembers his victims and leaves them in garbage bags in public places. A residential neighborhood. Next to a roller rink. Behind a Burger King. The investigation is a disaster. No physical evidence. Unreliable witnesses. To make matters worse, the FBI has lost contact with the star profiler working the case.

Can one man’s search for justice stand up to the forces of evil threatening to destroy him? A shocking murder drags Black newspaper columnist Clarence Abernathy into the disorienting world of inner-city gangs and racial conflict.

This second volume of a must-listen collection contains 15 bibliomysteries by best-selling and award-winning authors.

Marid Audran has become everything he once despised. Not so long ago, he was a hustler in the Budayeen, an Arabian ghetto in a Balkanized future Earth. Back then, as often as not, he didn't have the money to buy himself a drink. But he had his independence.Now Marid works for Friedlander Bey, "godfather" of the Budayeen, a man whose power stretches across a shattered, crumbling world.

Southern Sweden: Beautiful countryside, endless forests, coastal walks, dark days - and even darker nights. But beneath the beauty lies a dark heart... Skåne, 1986: On the night of Walpurgis, the eve of May Day, where bonfires are lit to ward off evil spirits and preparations are made to celebrate the renewal of spring, a sixteen-year-old girl is ritualistically murdered in the woods beside a castle. Her stepbrother is convicted of the terrible deed and shortly after, the entire family vanishes without a trace.

Berlin does not make it easy to write noir fiction - or perhaps Berlin makes it too easy. Noir tradition casts a long, influential, and even daunting shadow. Neither Döblin nor Benn, Brecht nor Lang, catered to any crime fiction traditions. They merely steeped their literary projects in a great deal of noir. And so it is with most of the stories in our anthology: they do not necessarily follow the usual patterns of crime fiction, but regard noir as a license to write as they wish, a certain way of approaching the city, and a prism through which its nature is viewed....

Running from a world which wants him dead, ex-detective Sergeant Jake Pettman journeys to the isolated town of Blue Falls, Maine, home of his infamous, murderous ancestors. But Jake struggles to hide from who he is, and when a child disappears, he finds himself drawn into an investigation that shares no parallels to anything he has ever seen before. Held back by a chief of police plagued and tormented by his own secrets, Jake fights for the truth. All the way to the door of Jotham MacLeoid. An insidious megalomaniac who feeds his victims to a killing pit.

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.

When mystery novelist turned private detective, Marius Quin, is invited to speak at a gala dinner by the mysterious Mrs Thistlethwaite he jumps at the chance of a weekend away on the English Riviera. With his sleuthing partner, Lady Bella Montague, in tow, Marius arrives at Torquay’s Grand Hotel. But they soon realise that, behind the shiny exteriors, all is not what it seems. After Thistlethwaite turns Marius’s big night into a character assassination at his expense, he wonders why he was invited in the first place.

“Alafair Burke's latest propulsive thrill-ride is a suspenseful, twisty mystery about memory, friendship and secrets. A page-turner of the highest order.” -Laura Dave, author of The Last Thing He Told Me The disappearance of a young woman leaves her best friend reeling and an NYPD homicide...

There's Bella, stay-at-home mum of Teddy. She suffered postpartum psychosis after Teddy's birth. There's Chrissy, divorce lawyer, married to Russell. They're having some problems with their sex life. There's Electra, mother to twins, who is struggling with her son's behaviour. There's Skye, a single mother, who used a sperm donor to have her baby. Then there's Jen. She was supposed to be a mother, but it hasn't worked out like she expected.