The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora Charles, New York's coolest crime-solving couple. Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick's client. Nick can no more resist the case than a morning cocktail or a good fight, and soon he and Nora are caught in a complicated web of confused identities.

A dying millionaire hires private eye Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, and Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

With its razor-sharp dialogue, brutal realism, and dark wit, Red Harvest established Hammett as a pioneer of noir fiction, cementing his legacy as the godfather of the genre. This is a relentless tale of moral ambiguity and violence, where every character walks the thin line between survival and self-destruction.

When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity. Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

In this intense detective thriller instilled with philosophical, religious, and social commentary, Dostoevsky studies the psychological impact upon a desperate and impoverished student when he murders a despicable pawnbroker, transgressing moral law to ultimately "benefit humanity".

Three critically acclaimed recordings are joined together in this dazzling Agatha Christie Triple Bill, read by award-winning narrators Alison Larkin and James Warwick, star of the Partners in Crime TV series on Masterpiece Theater.

Here in one recording is every Sherlock Holmes story ever written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Originally appearing in serial form, these famous stories are here presented in the order in which they were first published beginning in 1887. Included in this definitive, award-winning collection are four novels and 56 short stories, a total of 60 titles. The 56 short stories are aggregated into five named collections, just as they were originally published in book form.

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.

A call from a distraught wife, and another from Lt. Murphy of the Chicago PD Special Investigation Unit makes Harry believe things are looking up, but they are about to get worse, much worse. Someone is harnessing immense supernatural forces to commit a series of grisly murders. Someone has violated the first law of magic: Thou Shalt Not Kill. Tracking that someone takes Harry into the dangerous underbelly of Chicago, from mobsters to vampires....

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.

On the planet Tython, the ancient Je’daii order was founded. And at the feet of its wise Masters, Lanoree Brock learned the mysteries and methods of the Force - and found her calling as one of its most powerful disciples. But as strongly as the Force flowed within Lanoree and her parents, it remained absent in her brother, who grew to despise and shun the Je’daii, and whose training in its ancient ways ended in tragedy. Now, from her solitary life as a Ranger keeping order across the galaxy, Lanoree has been summoned by the Je’daii Council on a matter of utmost urgency.

In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes. Mr. Mercedes is a war between good and evil, from the master of suspense whose insight into the mind of this obsessed, insane killer is chilling and unforgettable.

Death is reporter Jack McEvoy's beat: his calling, his obsession. But this time, death brings McEvoy the story he never wanted to write - and the mystery he desperately needs to solve. A serial killer of unprecedented savagery and cunning is at large. His targets: homicide cops, each haunted by a murder case he couldn't crack. The killer's calling card: a quotation from the works of Edgar Allan Poe. His latest victim is McEvoy's own brother. And his last...may be McEvoy himself.

For maverick LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal...because the murdered man was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who had fought side by side with him in a hellish underground war. Now Bosch is about to relive the horror of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys to a daring criminal heist beneath the city, his survival instincts will once again be tested to their limit.

Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher is a drifter. He’s just passing through Margrave, Georgia, and in less than an hour, he’s arrested for murder. Not much of a welcome. All Reacher knows is that he didn’t kill anybody. At least not here. Not lately. But he doesn’t stand a chance of convincing anyone. Not in Margrave, Georgia. Not a chance in hell.

When Sam Spade gets drawn into the Maltese Falcon case, we know what to expect: straight talk, hard questions, no favors, and no way for anyone to get underneath the protective shell he wears like a second skin. We know that his late partner, Miles Archer, was a son of a bitch; that Spade is sleeping with Archer's wife, Iva; that his tomboyish secretary, Effie Perine, is the only innocent in his life. What we don't know is how Spade became who he is. Spade & Archer completes the picture.

It's San Francisco, 1928, and Sam Spade is a wisecracking, womanising Private Investigator. Missing husbands and unfaithful wives are his usual stock-in-trade, but when the beautifully distressed Miss Wonderley calls he gets involved in a dangerous caper most people would run a mile from. Miss Wonderley asks Sam's partner, Miles Archer, to shadow Floyd Thursby, whom she maintains has kidnapped her sister. But then Archer is shot dead, and Miss Wonderley's story turns out to be a lie.

A story about privacy and its importance for happiness and personal fulfillment.

The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora Charles, New York's coolest crime-solving couple. Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick's client. Nick can no more resist the case than a morning cocktail or a good fight, and soon he and Nora are caught in a complicated web of confused identities.

With its razor-sharp dialogue, brutal realism, and dark wit, Red Harvest established Hammett as a pioneer of noir fiction, cementing his legacy as the godfather of the genre. This is a relentless tale of moral ambiguity and violence, where every character walks the thin line between survival and self-destruction.

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.

Dashiell Hammett is best known as both pioneer and master of American hard-boiled detective fiction, but these dozen and a half stories both affirm that reputation and present him in a different light. Along with the full-length treatments On the Make and The Kiss-Off, this collection includes never before and rarely published stories that explore failed romance, courage in the face of uncertainty, hypocrisy, and crass opportunism.

As private eye Lew Archer follows the clues from the canyon sanctuaries of the megarich to jazz joints where you can get beaten up between sets, The Moving Target blends sex, greed, misdirected love, and family hatred into an explosive crime novel.

The godfather of the hard-boiled detective novel, Dashiell Hammett is widely acknowledged as one of America's greatest mystery writers. This collection brings together the BBC radio adaptations of his works for the first time, including the iconic The Maltese Falcon, featuring his most famous character: Sam Spade.

In The Best Cases of The Continental Op, an original compilation of eight stories from Skyboat Media, the Op walks, stalks, and runs down the steep streets of San Francisco to solve crimes of blackmail, murder, stolen identities, and arson, and each story contains so many twists and turns you’ll be hooked until the very (surprising) end....

Tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful, Double Indemnity gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1936, this novel reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.

Here's Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer in their roughest and readiest—a double-strength shot of sex, violence, and action that is vintage Spillane all the way. It's a tough-guy mystery to please even the most bloodthirsty of fans!

Hot on the heels of Best Cases of the Continental Op comes Honest Gain: Dicey Cases of the Continental Op, another original compilation from Skyboat Media. The Continental Op is back on the case, tracking down thieves and murderers from the steep streets of San Francisco to the rough and tumble Wild West in Arizona. These six stories featuring the Continental Op show that this private eye is not afraid to get his hands dirty in order to get the job done right, or get himself hurt in the process.

Dashiell Hammett was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, a screenplay writer, and political activist. Among his enduring character creations are Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, the Continental Op, and P. I. Rush, introduced in this book, who is ugly, mean, focused, and "works for pay". Hammett is widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time and was called, in his obituary in The New York Times, "the dean of the...'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction." Ths short novellette is a crime story with an intricate plot and characters, and a surprise twist at the end.

In the1930s and '40s, Black Mask was the single most important magazine for the modern mystery field. Here writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Earl Stanley Gardner reshaped the established view of mystery fiction, creating the "hard-boiled" private eye. Now this series resurrects from those pages the toughest of tough detectives in sonic dramatizations from the award-winning Hollywood Theater of the Ear.