Short Stories Crime Suspense

Desperate times call for desperate measures. You've lost your job and your family needs money. You've exhausted all other options. Your last chance to bring home the bacon is to holdup a tavern and its patrons. As you wait in their restroom, trying to muster up the courage, two other robbers come in and proceed to rob your tavern. This is the last straw. Time for action.

Penelope was a plain, unassuming woman that nobody noticed. Her job was going nowhere. Enter Debbie, her new co-worker at the insurance company where Penelope had gone unnoticed for nearly three years. Debbie's going places in the company, and fast. Why? Because she saved her money and got breast implants. Once Penelope saw what those implants did for Debbie, she decided to have the operation herself. One way or another, she would get noticed. Be careful what you wish for, Penelope. Attention may not be all that it's cracked up to be.

It's 1964. Philip Duran has been driving all night to make a sales meeting in the wee hours of the morning in Hollywood. Vern Grayson has the purchasing power at MGM. Mr. Duran's new invention could be just the thing MGM needs to pull ahead of its competitors, but can Duran convince Grayson to buy his contraption? Find out here, because Philip Duran will do, anything for a sale.

Every morning at the same hour on the golf course, Jack Hartington hears mysterious cries for help coming from a cottage. He speaks to the resident and learns that she has unsettling dreams of a woman with a blue Chinese vase. Believing that the cries for help are from the late Mrs. Turner, the former resident of the cottage, Jack hires a psychic investigator to spend a night in the house, a night which proves to have startling results.

Get a real job? Not on your life. You'd rather keep pulling the same cons on unsuspecting rubs. Your latest con involves selling TV boxes with just a picture tube in it to the gullible public. It keeps you in money and your cost is zero. But what happens when you unkowingly sell one of these useless boxes to Anthony Vonetti, crime underworld hit man? Well, you did and when they see what's in the box, your life won't be worth a plug nickel. You have to get it back before that happens. Good luck.

You just know your husband's stepping out on you but you can't prove it. Well, wait a minute, this is Hollywood and you know a hairdresser who knows a makeup artist. Together they can transform you into a beautiful, unrecognizeable tart. Then you can go out, pick up your husband at his favorite bar and see just how far he'll go. What can possibly go wrong?

Your Aunt Grace is dying and you are her only living relative so you would be the logical choice as sole heir to her fortune. However, Aunt Grace has nine cats that also figure into the equasion. Will you split the fortune 10 ways? Or will that plan you've hatched help you keep it all? What will you do?

It's been decades since the beatings and harassment and the humiliation of this high school bully, yet here he was big as life standing right in front of you at the car rental counter. You may never get this chance again. Go for it. Tell him what a jerk he was and how you'd like to punch his lights out. You jump over the counter, ready to exact your vengeance but you stop. Your bully is supporting himself on two crutches and he has braces on both legs. Now what? You can't very well beat up a cripple. Or can you?

This ain't no Jimmy Stewart Christmas movie. A policeman patrols the downtown area during the Christmas season, checking knobs and keeping the neighborhood safe. His rounds take him past the bridge on the edge of town where he sees a man standing on the railing, contemplating jumping to his death. Can our friendly neighborhood cop talk him out of it and give him a reason to live? Sometimes it's better to just mind your own business.

Penelope is a meter maid who also does double duty emptying the parking meters and counting/sorting the change. This is how she first got interested in coin collecting. She started out by finding a Liberty dime, then a couple of buffalo nickels and finally several wheat pennies. While sorting her find at home one night, she discovers that someone had dropped a rare coin into a parking meter and she ended up with it. Could she keep it? Probably not after the original owner was killed. What to do, what to do.

C. J. Box, #1 New York Times best-selling author of the hugely popular Joe Pickett series, selects the best short mystery and crime fiction of the year in this annual “treat for crime-fiction fans” (Library Journal).

Shelby works as a dog walker in northern California, and she’s just finished up her bi-weekly trip to the park with a husky named Pluto. When she brings him back to his house, she finds his owner - Todd Burke, a well-known local businessman and founder of an organic supplements company - lying on the bathroom floor, dead. A detective arrives on the scene. As she interviews Shelby, the body is inspected by a medical examiner, and more cops search Todd’s home, it becomes clear that the victim’s life was less picture-perfect than his clean-cut persona might lead you to believe.

In our dangerous world, offenders cannot always be brought down by the justice system. When a different kind of justice is needed—swift, effective, and personal—a new type of avenger must take action. In Vengeance, best-selling author Lee Child, “a superb craftsman of suspense” ( Entertainment Weekly), presents 21 riveting stories from some of today’s top crime writers.

This anthology of rare stories of crime and suspense brings together a selection of rare tales by masters of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction for the first time in book form, including a newly discovered Agatha Christie crime story that has not been seen since 1922. At a time when crime and thriller writing has once again overtaken the sales of general and literary fiction, Bodies from the Library unearths lost stories from the Golden Age, that period between the World Wars when detective fiction captured the public’s imagination.

The "Hot Kid" of the U.S. Marshals Service, Carl Webster maintains the law with a cool, showdown attitude. He's one of the richest creations in Elmore Leonard's half century of delivering the goods. From his appearances in the critically acclaimed novels The Hot Kid and Up in Honey's Room, Carl returns to lay down the law in a novella that originally appeared as a serial in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Explore the world of Maynard Wills, PhD, professor of folklore and fan of the podcast, Video Palace. The podcast followed a man named Mark Cambria, who along with his girlfriend Tamra Wulff, investigated the origins of a series of esoteric white video tapes. Cambria went missing in pursuit of these tapes, but not before hearing whispers of an ominous figure called the Eyeless Man.

Brigitte had a rough start in life. It all began when her village was bombed when she was just a child. After being sent to the US by a refugee agency, she drifted from one foster home to another for some time. In her pursuit to find the sense of family, she is recruited by the Russian mob, where she meets up with an old friend. The mob offers them everything except freedom. She wants more. She changes her name and makes a new life for herself.

When wronged, is it better to seek revenge or to forgive? A Serious Matter describes the efforts of two long-lost childhood friends, Jeannie and Violet, to come to terms with their hatred of a mutual, unnamed enemy. Jeannie already has a restraining order against the man, her estranged husband who previously tried to kill her. The same man also killed Violet’s fiancé in a drunk-driving accident on Violet’s wedding day and feels no remorse. Jeannie learns about the accident and reaches out to Violet at the funeral, rekindling their friendship.

The Rules have allowed Andrew Phillips to commit the most heinous of crimes for decades. He meticulously plans and executes kidnappings, murders, and other unspeakable acts to children. No one has ever come close to solving the atrocities he perpetrates every few months. Phillips thinks he's successfully committed the perfect crimes. And then he meets Asher Benson.

Twenty classic authors from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction are brought together in the latest “Bodies from the Library” anthology series of previously unpublished and uncollected stories of crime and suspense.