Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Noir

Los Angeles, 1916: Photographer Bill Ogden has opened a portrait studio in the seedy noir world of early Hollywood, where he is joined by his granddaughter, Flavia—a woman in need of a fresh start after bludgeoning her abusive husband to death in Wichita. Though his business is mainly legit, Bill finds himself brushing up against the “blue movie” porn industry growing in the shadows of the motion picture mainstream. When a series of grisly murders take place across the city, Bill and his capable granddaughter are pulled into events as tricky and tangled as anything this side of The Big Sleep.

In this second book in the Frank Yakabuski Mystery series, Yakabuski is called in to investigate a gruesome crime scene. A body has been left hanging from a schoolyard fence. On closer inspection, Yak finds a large diamond in the murder victim’s mouth. Two criminal gangs - the Shiners and the Travellers - are fighting with each other, and Yakabuski turns to his father, a now-retired detective who has a long history with the gangs, for advice in the interrogation. And as if this weren’t enough for one detective, a serial killer is taking a deadly road trip through the United States.

1955: Tampa, Florida, is a city pulsing with Sicilian and Cuban gangsters, cigar factories, sweet rum, and violence. The death of retired kingpin Charlie Wall—the White Shadow—has shocked the city, sending cops, reporters, and associates scrambling to find those responsible. As the trail winds through neighborhoods rich and poor, enmeshing the innocent and corrupt alike all the way down to the streets and casinos of Havana, an extraordinary story of revenge, honor, and greed emerges.

Three cell phones ring in an opulent London suite. The calls go unanswered, because their recipients are dead. Earlier that night, four old friends and lovers meet for a reunion dinner. Miko and Robert haven't seen each other in 10 years; Miko hates Robert for the money he's made with shady ethics. Unbeknownst to Miko, his wife, Veera, also slept with Robert the last time everyone was together. Robert's young trophy wife, Elise, has no old grudges to bear, but will be swept up in the murderous fray.

Set to the cranking beat and amphetamine buzz of Vancouver's early punk scene, Zero Avenue follows Frankie Del Rey, a talented and rising punk star who runs just enough dope on the side to pay the bills and keep her band, Middle Finger, together. The trouble is she's running it for Marty Sayles, a powerful drug dealer who controls the Eastside with a fist. When Frankie strikes up a relationship with Johnny Falco, the owner of one of the only Vancouver clubs willing to give punk a chance, she finds out he's having his own money problems.

Award-winning author Edwidge Danticat edits this collection of stories that puts a noir twist on the Haitian experience. From kidnappings gone wrong to deadly sibling rivalries, Haiti Noir features some of the Caribbean nation’s leading voices, including Gary Victor, Evelyne Trouillot, Kettly Mars, and Patrick Sylvain.

In the final scene of Cape Diamond, millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds went missing, which is where Ron Corbett’s latest novel begins. When rumors spread that they were buried on Mission Road, an old logging trail outside the town, people swarm to the area, setting up temporary camps and searching for fortune. But when a known murderer shows up, the real mystery begins.

Yurika is a freelancer in the Tokyo underworld. She poses as a prostitute, carefully targeting potential johns, selecting powerful and high-profile men. When she is alone with them, she drugs them and takes incriminating photos to sell for blackmail purposes. She knows very little about the organization she's working for and is perfectly satisfied with the arrangement, as long as it means she doesn't have to reveal anything about her identity, either. She operates alone and lives a private, solitary life.

Shortlisted for the Anthony, Nebula, Edgar, Shamus, and Gold Dagger Awards, best-selling author James Sallis is a master of the gritty crime drama. The Killer Is Dying tracks the fortunes of three men of vastly different ages, backgrounds, and ambitions. Though they never meet, a hired killer on his last job, a burned out detective, and a young boy plagued by nightmares have their lives intersect in compelling ways in the scorching metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona.

The Donnybrook is a three-day bare-knuckle tournament held on a thousand-acre plot out in the sticks of southern Indiana. Twenty fighters. One wire-fence ring. Fight until only one man is left standing while a rowdy festival of onlookers - drunk and high on whatever’s on offer - bet on the fighters. Jarhead is a desperate man who’d do just about anything to feed his children. He’s also the toughest fighter in southeastern Kentucky, and he’s convinced that his ticket to a better life is one last fight with a cash prize so big it’ll solve all his problems.

Years ago Marshal Asher Thrall had shot mad-dog killer Ben Sharkey. And Sharkey has just repaid the favor in spades. With a bullet still in his chest, Ash knows he's a walking dead man. But he's going to make sure Sharkey is one step ahead of him.

The pressures of fame and an obsessive stalker have driven pop star Olivia Smith to take shelter at Halcyon Hall, an exclusive spa on a remote island off the coast of Maine. Yet from the moment she arrives, there are rumors about women disappearing and stories about the resort’s grisly past. Then a note arrives from her stalker, proving that nowhere is truly safe....

Over dinner in a Brooklyn restaurant, Marshall learns that his former NYPD colleague owes money - a lot of money - to the wrong people. But the conversation is cut short by gunfire, and, suddenly, Ray is lying dead on the restaurant floor. As Marshall investigates the murder, tracking down the drug dealers, bag men, bent cops and mob players within Ray’s orbit, it becomes clear there’s far more to the killing than just a debt. But who is responsible for Vialoux’s death…and why?

It’s been seven years since Gloomy Knob landed in the Ted Stevens High-Security Federal Penitentiary and five years since the end of the war, the one North Korea started when they sent a missile to Cold Storage, Alaska. Serving a life sentence for the murder of his sister, Gloomy spends his time trying to forget about the past. Then one day, Gloomy is snatched from his off-site work station. Instead of celebrating his newfound freedom, Gloomy comes unmoored - he feels he belongs in prison. But his kidnappers believe Gloomy knows where a second nuclear warhead is hidden.

Douglas Rigby, attorney-at-law, is bankrupt. He's just sunk his last $200,000 - a clandestine "loan" from his last remaining client, former bigshot TV exec Glenn Haskill - into a cocaine deal gone wrong. The lesson? Never trust anyone else with the dirty work. Desperate to get back on top, Rigby formulates an art forgery scheme involving one of Glenn's priceless paintings, a victimless crime.

Things have gone from bad to worse for T.J. Peterson. The cops have kicked him off the force, his girlfriend called it quits, his best friend and former partner won't speak to him, and his estranged 20-year-old daughter, Katy, continues to torment him with photos of the hellholes she is living in. Add in a shrink's diagnosis of PTSD, and Peterson is barely holding it together. When he receives an anonymous text message with an online link to a video of a young journalist being tortured, Peterson does the only thing he knows how to do - he sets out to save her.

The stories that you will hear in this collection highlight all things Accra, everything that the city was and is - the remaining vestiges of colonialism, the pride of independence, the nexus of indigenous tribes and other groups from all over the world, the tension between modernity and traditionalism, the symbolism and storytelling both obvious and coded, the moral high ground, the duplicity and deceit, the most basic human failings laid bare alongside fear and love and pain, and the corrupting desire to have the very things you are not meant to have.

A pair of hit men working a job for a meth kingpin have a very bad day, and the resulting bushfire draws attention to a drug lab and two bodies burned up in a Mercedes. Sergeant Ellen Destry - newly minted head of her department's sex crime unit - and Inspector Hal Challis return in this newest installment of Gary Disher's Peninsula-based crimes series. With meth-related crime on the rise, interdepartmental tensions mount, and Challis soon finds himself fighting to keep control of his case.

Rene Beckman is a dishonored ex-cop with only two things on his mind: his new boat, the Triggerfish; and his hot date, an environmentalist named Vicki. When the two unknowingly dock the boat in the same secluded cove as a Mexican cartel's drug submarine, the date ends with a bang. With the cartel's coke-for-guns deal with local bikers torched by Beckman, he's forced to go on the run with half the underworld chasing him through the streets of Vancouver and the waters surrounding it.

Set in a bitterly benighted, mine-polluted corner of Virginia, Nitro Mountain follows a group of people bound together by alcohol, small-time crime, and music. There's Leon, a hapless bass player who can embroil himself in trouble just by getting out of bed in the morning. And his would-be girlfriend, Jennifer, who's living with Arnett, the town's most dangerous thug - and hoping Leon will help poison him. And there's Arnett himself, a psychopath for the ages.