Humor Crime

You’ve lost your job as a department store lingerie buyer, your car’s been repossessed, and most of your furniture and small appliances have been sold off to pay last month’s rent. Now the rent is due again. And you live in New Jersey. What do you do? If you’re Stephanie Plum, you become a bounty hunter. But not just a nickel-and-dime bounty hunter; you go after the big money. That means a cop gone bad. And not just any cop. She goes after Joe Morelli, a disgraced former vice cop who is also the man that took her virginity....

In this award-winning Audible Studios production, Trevor Noah tells his wild coming-of-age tale during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa. It’s a story that begins with his mother throwing him from a moving van to save him from a potentially fatal dispute with gangsters, then follows the budding comedian’s path to self-discovery through episodes both poignant and comical.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes takes on three extremely strange cases. First, the detectives investigate how and why a local business owner was stabbed...in the back of the knee. Next, a young woman's imaginary boyfriend goes missing. And, in the final investigation, Varg must determine whether nocturnal visitations at a local spa have a supernatural element.

This novel by Carl Hiaasen, author of Tourist Season and Native Tongue, begins as most thrillers do, with a killing. But this is no everyday, hum-drum, garden variety killing. Our hero, Nick Stranahan, a 42-year-old private investigator who has killed five men and been married five times, skewers his attacker's aorta with the razor-sharp bill of a stuffed marlin.

London, early 1950s. Marcia Beasley of St John's Wood is discovered dead in her home, naked and covered with a coal scuttle. Detective Sergeant Greenleaf is tasked with solving the crime and bringing meaning to her gruesome death, and it seems her whole social circle have secrets to hide and grudges to bear. Who, for example, is the limping midnight visitor? Is the bibulous priest as ingenious as he seems? And will Mrs Burkiss ever yield her keys to the broom cupboard?

Tourist season is swinging into high gear in Miami. So are the activities of a bizarre terrorist group determined to keep the hapless "snowbirds" away. Armed with bombs, weed, and jumbled credos, they move toward their grand target, the Orange Bowl Parade, with plans to bring Miami and its tourist trade to a halt.

Maud is an irascible 88-year-old Swedish woman with no family, no friends, and...no qualms about a little murder. Ever since her darling father's untimely death when she was only 18, Maud has lived in the family's spacious apartment in downtown Gothenburg rent-free, thanks to a minor clause in a hastily negotiated contract. That was how Maud learned that good things can come from tragedy. Now in her late 80s, Maud contents herself with traveling the world and surfing the net from the comfort of her father's ancient armchair. It's a solitary existence, and she likes it that way.

Cold-blooded murder just isn't Thomas Lang's cup of tea. Offered a bundle to assassinate an American industrialist, he opts to warn the intended victim instead - a good deed that soon takes a bad turn. Quicker than he can down a shot of his favorite whiskey, Lang is bashing heads with a Buddha statue, matching wits with evil billionaires, and putting his life (among other things) in the hands of a bevy of femme fatales. Up against rogue CIA agents, wannabe terrorists, and an arms dealer looking to make a high-tech killing, Lang's out to save the leggy lady he has come to love...and prevent an international bloodbath to boot.

A twisted tale of murder in the world of big-stakes bass fishing tournaments. Filled with ex-wives, evangelists, and an armed pit-bull, this is a story that could only be concocted by Carl Hiaasen, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best-selling author, and czar of Florida noir fiction.

An atmospheric debut novel set on the gritty streets of Victorian London, Some Danger Involved introduces detective Cyrus Barker and his assistant, Thomas Llewelyn, as they work to solve the gruesome murder of a young scholar in London's Jewish ghetto. When the eccentric and enigmatic Barker takes the case, he must hire an assistant, and out of all who answer an ad for a position with "some danger involved", he chooses downtrodden Llewelyn, a gutsy young man with a murky past.

Detective Ulf Varg from the Department of Sensitive Crimes is often called upon to investigate unusual matters. But rarely is he asked to conduct an inquiry on behalf of his own family. Is such a thing ethical? Adding to Ulf's moral discomfort is the fact that he does not exactly see eye to eye with his younger brother Bjorn - a leading player in one of Sweden's right-wing parties, the Moderate Extremists. Still, family is family, so Ulf finds himself working to uncover the mole leaking secrets to a rival party, the Extreme Moderates.

Fletch, now newly engaged and happily living out his days in Italy, finds himself embroiled in yet another scandal. His soon-to-be father-in-law has been kidnapped and is now presumed dead, and the priceless collection of rare art that belongs to his fiancée’s family has been stolen. Ever the investigative reporter, he receives a tip about the missing art that lands him in Boston, where he walks right into a murder scene in his apartment. What clearly looks like a setup to the unfazed Fletch looks quite different to the detective assigned to the case, Mr. Francis Xavier Flynn.

When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at a remote ski chalet on vacation, the last thing he intends to do is get involved in any police work. He's there to ski, drink brandy, and loaf around in blissful solitude. But he hadn't counted on the other vacationers, an eccentric bunch, including a famous hypnotist, a physicist with a penchant for gymnastic feats, a sulky teenager of indeterminate gender, and the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Moses.

Sunshine State trivia buff Serge A. Storms loves eliminating jerks and pests. His drug-addled partner Coleman loves cartoons. Hot stripper Sharon Rhodes loves cocaine, especially when purchased with rich dead men's money. On the other hand, there's Sean and David, who love fishing and are kind to animals - and who are about to cross paths with a suitcase filled with $5 million in stolen insurance money. Serge wants the suitcase. Sharon wants the suitcase. Coleman wants more drugs... and the suitcase.

Ensconced in a lovely tropical villa on idyllic Triggerfish Lane, Jim Davenport anticipates the good life to come. But this isn't living -- it's Florida, and the neighborhood is not quite what it seems. It's got overly aggressive Little League parents, drug-free Rastafarians, homicidal hookers, unnatural sex and casual violence. Oh, yes, and there's a psychopathic serial killer-cum-Sunshine-State folklorist named Serge A. Storms living directly across the street.

When Fergus tells Diana he's taking her on a flower-arranging retreat for her birthday, she should have been more suspicious. Especially when he announces that he's coming with her. After discovering the whole truth about the retreat, Diana is still considering how to murder Fergus...when one of their fellow flower arrangers is found dead - stabbed in the back with a mystery weapon. With the retreat on complete lockdown, Diana and Fergus have a mystery to solve that wasn't part of the itinerary. Will they find the killer before the clock runs out?

It would take a miracle to keep Dortmunder out of jail. Though he cased the electronics store perfectly, the cops surprised him, turning up in the alley just as he was walking out the back door, a television in each hand. Already a two-time loser, without divine intervention he faces a long stretch inside. Then God sends J. Radcliffe Stonewiler, a celebrity lawyer who gets Dortmunder off with hardly any effort at all. Stonewiler was sent by Arnold Chauncey, an art lover with a cash-flow problem. He asks the thief to break into his house and make off with a valuable painting in exchange for a quarter of the insurance money.

As a shaky truce between suburban gangsters starts to unravel, schlubby civilian Scott Clark has other things on his mind: if he can't afford to buy out his ex-father-in-law, Scott's about to lose the only house he's ever called home. In the red-hot urban housing market, he doesn't have a chance - until he and his best friends take the desperate measure of staging a fake drive-by shooting on the property to push down the asking price. But then Scott's mobster-posturing stunt attracts the attention of the real criminals.

Two weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Las Vegas native Bobby Ingersoll finds out he’s inherited a crushing gambling debt from his scumbag father. The debt is owed to an even scummier bag named Fraser Ruphart who oversees his bottom-rung criminal empire from the classy-adjacent Trump International Hotel. Bobby’s prospects of paying off the note, which comes due the day he turns twenty-one, are about as dim as the sign on the tower’s façade.

There's a different schemer or slimeball behind every door: cocaine duckpins who have survived only by the dumbest fortune, hard-luck gigolos desperate to score, undercover cops busting undercover cops who are running sting operations on undercover cops.