Showing titles in Noir

The Akashic Noir series’ forensic study of Southern California sharpens its focus on one of Los Angeles’ most recognized neighborhoods.

It is the present day, and the world is as we know it: smartphones, social networking, and Happy Meals. Save for one thing: The Civil War never occurred. A gifted young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshal Service. He's got plenty of work. In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called "the Hard Four". On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn't right—with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.

When McGee picks up the phone and hears a voice from the past, he can't help it. He has to meddle. Especially when he has the chance to reunite Sam Taggart, a reckless, restless man like himself, with the woman who's still waiting for him. But what begins as a simple matchmaking scheme soon becomes a bloody chase that takes McGee to Mexico, a beautiful country - and one from which he hopes to return alive.

When Dan Armstrong is asked to provide security at a private villa on the outskirts of Pisa, he’s pretty sure it will be an easy job. Villa Gregory is remote; the gathered guests are rich – what could possibly go wrong? Inside the high walls of the palatial villa, Dan discovers the gathered guests are some of the most powerful tycoons in the media world, with plans for world domination. With so much at stake, Dan redoubles his efforts to keep everyone safe. But when one of the group is found murdered, Dan’s heart sinks – especially considering Anna’s own daughter is in the frame.

There's nothing more deadly in a Louisiana bayou than the wildlife thriving in the dark green water and unbearable heat - except a cold-blooded killer with a body to hide. There nothing more desperate than the witness to a murder - with but one option to keep her from a similar fate. Run far and fast and don't look back.

Caught in a snowstorm of drugs, passion, and hate, Spenser investigates a cocaine-related murder.

When single-mother Devon Connor hires Elvis Cole, it’s because her troubled teenage son Tyson is flashing cash and she’s afraid he’s dealing drugs. But the truth is devastatingly different. With two others, he’s been responsible for a string of high-end burglaries, a crime spree that takes a deadly turn when one of them is murdered and Tyson and his girlfriend disappear. They stole the wrong thing from the wrong man, and, determined to get it back, he has hired two men who are smart and brutal and the best at what they do.

A serial killer stalks women in rural Ohio. He is deranged but brilliant, known only by the grotesque nickname the media has given him - The Doll Parts Killer. The name is apt. He dismembers his victims and leaves them in garbage bags in public places. A residential neighborhood. Next to a roller rink. Behind a Burger King. The investigation is a disaster. No physical evidence. Unreliable witnesses. To make matters worse, the FBI has lost contact with the star profiler working the case.

When a serial arsonist terrorizes Los Angeles county, FBI profiler Violet Darger heads over to California to investigate. The fires keep coming faster. The body count rises, and the threat hangs over the city as thick as the smog. The case file is brutal - stuffed with photographs of charred bodies, human faces melted beyond recognition. And when Darger gets up close to the crimes - the real thing - that sense of savagery only intensifies.

After the tragic and bloody end to The Cartel's reign, Carter is forced into isolation to evade the law. With his wife, Miamor, facing federal charges and his dear brother six feet under, Carter has never been more alone. His empire is at his feet, and he has no idea how to rebuild his kingdom. The only thing that is certain is that he has to stay out of the way and off the radar of the feds until he can figure out how to get his lady out of prison.

Fresh from maternity leave, Detective Elma finds herself confronted with a complex case, when a man is found murdered in a holiday cottage in the depths of the Icelandic countryside - the victim of a frenzied knife attack, with a shocking message scrawled on the wall above him.

Her body floats. A bloated thing half atop the river. Naked. Pale. Mouth and eyes open wide. When two fishermen discover a corpse floating in the Clackamas river, profiler Violet Darger heads to rural Oregon to hunt another serial killer. What she discovers in the woods might change the course of her life. What secrets does the water conceal? The girl in the water marks the third such case in the area - all drowned with superficial stab wounds and discovered in a body of water - and Darger feels certain she won't be the last. The corpses are badly decomposed.

When three bodies turn up in a landfill outside of Philadelphia, FBI profiler Violet Darger heads to Pennsylvania to investigate. Right away there's a major complication. The emaciated corpses appear to have been starved to death. Darger arrives in time for the autopsies. As she watches the withered bodies laid out on the stainless steel slabs of the morgue, their faces crusted with sandy soil, skin pulled taut around knobby cheekbones, she thinks: what kind of a person could carry out such harsh acts?

A suspicious death, a pregnant woman suddenly gone missing: Quirke's latest case leads him inexorably toward the dark machinations of an old foe. Perhaps Quirke has been down among the dead too long. Lately the Irish pathologist has suffered hallucinations and blackouts, and he fears the cause is a brain tumor. A specialist diagnoses an old head injury caused by a savage beating; all that's needed, the doctor declares, is an extended rest.

Philip Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.

Spenser's out to make war, not love, as he goes after Boston's entire X-rated industry. Pretty teenager April Kyle has disappeared into the city's darkest underworld, and to rescue her, Spencer pits muscle and wit against bullets and bullies.

When a farmer and his son go missing whilst chasing rustlers, DCI Evan Warlow and his team are called in to investigate. Everything points to a botched raid by heartless thieves, but with no bodies, and little or no clues, the team quickly start chasing their tails. The close-knit community reels from the shock, but not everyone the team comes across is being entirely honest, and it quickly transpires that, under their prim and proper facades, some have secrets they are desperate to keep.

It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse—and concealing the cause of death.

Fifteen-year-old Ámbar has never known any parent other than her father, Víctor Mondragón, nor any life other than his. When a tattooed mercenary kills Víctor’s best friend and vows that Víctor is next, father and daughter set off on a joyride across Argentina in search of bloody retribution....

Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.