Fadeout is the first of Joseph Hansen’s twelve classic mysteries featuring rugged Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator who is contentedly gay. When entertainer Fox Olson’s car plunges off a bridge in a storm, a death claim is filed, but where is Olson’s body? As Brandstetter questions family, fans, and detractors, he grows certain Olson is still alive and must find him before the would-be killer does. Suspenseful and wry, shrewd and deeply felt, Fadeout remains as fresh today as when it startled readers more than thirty years ago.

A completely revised edition of the first Henry Rios mystery, The Little Death, Lay Your Sleeping Head introduces Michael Nava’s singular protagonist, gay Latino criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios. Rios, beset by personal and professional problems, begins a passionate affair with the black sheep heir to a great California fortune who tells Rios an improbable tale of murder and sexual predation in his wealthy family. When the young man is found dead of an apparent drug overdose, Rios begins an investigation that ultimately reveals much more than murder.

A former police officer turned private investigator, Nick Nowak is haunted by his abrupt departure from the department, as well as, the traumatic end of his relationship with librarian Daniel Laverty. In these three stories set in Chicago during the early eighties, Nick locates a missing young man for a mysterious client, solves a case of arson at a popular nightspot, and goes undercover to prove a dramatic suicide was actually murder.

Devastatingly handsome and insanely rich, Farrell Covington is capable of anything and impossible to resist. He’s a clear-eyed romantic, an aesthete but not a snob, self-indulgent yet wildly generous. As the son of one of the country’s most powerful and deeply conservative families, the world could be his. But when he falls for Nate Reminger, an aspiring writer from a nice Jewish family in Piscataway, New Jersey, the results are passionate and catastrophic. Together, the two embark on a unique romance that spans half a century.

Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.

Fledging PI Zachariah Davies’s wealthy and eccentric client, toymaker Alton Beacher, wants to hire an investigator who can pose as his boyfriend while figuring out who is behind the recent attempts on his life. And Zach, struggling to save the business his father built, is just desperate enough to set aside his misgivings and take the job.

Long Beach, California, 1996. Despite having little obvious experience, bartender Dom Reilly is hired as an investigator for the Freedom Agenda, a not-for-profit justice project. His first case involves a 12-year-old homicide, in which a teenage girl was viciously murdered.

Everett Larkin works for the Cold Case Squad: an elite - if understaffed and overworked - group of detectives who solve the forgotten deaths of New York City. Larkin is different from others, but his deduction skills are unmatched and his memory for minute details is unparalleled. So when a spring thunderstorm uproots a tree in Madison Square Park, unearthing a crate with human remains inside, the best Cold Case detective is assigned the job.

Zachary Quinto - best known for his role as the Nimoy-approved Spock in the recent Star Trek reboot and the menacing, power-stealing serial killer, Sylar, in Heroes - brings his well-earned sci-fi credentials and simmering intensity to this audio-exclusive novella from master storyteller John Scalzi. One day, not long from now, it becomes almost impossible to murder anyone - 999 times out of a thousand, anyone who is intentionally killed comes back. How? We don't know.

Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening, her husband, Gabriel, returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face and then never speaks another word. Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety.

Ten strangers are lured to an isolated island mansion off the Devon coast by a mysterious "U.N. Owen". At dinner a recorded message accuses each of them in turn of having a guilty secret, and by the end of the night one of the guests is dead. Stranded by a violent storm, and haunted by a nursery rhyme counting down one by one...one by one they begin to die. Who among them is the killer? And will any of them survive?

The Kingdom of Sand features a nameless narrator who has survived the death of his friends to AIDS and the loss of his parents to old age and tragedy. Now he must witness the slow demise of a friend just a shade older than he is. Semi-anonymous sexual encounters, gallows humor, and classic films are his tools for staving off the dying of the light. In prose that’s in turn mordantly funny and hauntingly elegiac, Andrew Holleran takes the listener from a video porn shop off Route 301 to the memory of parties in Washington, DC.

It's 1949. When war veteran Aloysius Archer is released from Carderock Prison, he is sent to Poca City on parole with a short list of dos and a much longer list of don'ts: do report regularly to his parole officer, don't go to bars, certainly don't drink alcohol, do get a job - and don't ever associate with loose women. The small town quickly proves more complicated and dangerous than Archer's years serving in the war or his time in jail.

When Teancum Leon, a wildlife veterinarian, and his husband, semi-reformed conman Jeremiah Berger, go to a conference in central Missouri, they’re expecting a short and uneventful trip. Tean will present a paper, attend a few panels, and network (under duress). Jem is looking forward to unlimited poolside drinks, some well-deserved couple time, and peace and quiet.

Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret—but it's not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they've needed to keep others out. And now they're worried they're keeping a murderer in. When your existence is a crime, everything you do is criminal, and the gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world forever.