Showing titles in Hard-Boiled

When young London professional Alex Evans is informed that his sister's body has been pulled from an icy lake in Northern Lapland, he assumes his irresponsible sister accidentally drowned. He travels to the wealthy winter resort where Vicky worked as a tour guide and meets Agatha Koskinen, the detective in charge. Agatha is a no-nonsense single mother of three who already thinks there's more to Vicky's case than meets the eye. As the two form an unlikely alliance, Alex also begins to suspect the small town where his sister lived and died is harbouring secrets.

Sonny Lofthus is a strangely charismatic and complacent young man. Sonny’s been in prison for a dozen years, nearly half his life. The inmates who seek out his uncanny abilities to soothe leave his cell feeling absolved. They don’t know or care that Sonny has a serious heroin habit - or where or how he gets his uninterrupted supply of the drug. Or that he’s serving time for other peoples’ crimes. Sonny took the first steps toward addiction when his father took his own life rather than face exposure as a corrupt cop. Now Sonny is the seemingly malleable center of a whole infrastructure of corruption....

A wealthy Pasadena widow with a mean streak, a missing daughter-in-law with a past, and a gold coin worth a small fortune - the elements don't quite add up until Marlowe discovers evidence of murder, rape, blackmail, and the worst kind of human exploitation.

A deranged, derelict, crazed Vietnam vet has been arrested for gunning down successful young lawyer Glenn Holtzmann at a corner phone booth on 11th Avenue—and the suspect's brother wants unlicensed private investigator Matthew Scudder to prove the madman innocent. But Scudder's curiosity and dedication are leading him to dark, unexplored places in his own heart…and to passions and secrets that could destroy everything he loves. In this unmerciful metropolis, no one is truly innocent—including Matthew Scudder.

An ancient brotherhood meets annually in the back room of a swank Manhattan restaurant, a fraternity created in secret to celebrate life by celebrating its dead. But the past three decades have not been kind to the Club of 31. Matthew Scudder - ex-cop and ex-boozer - has known death in all its guises, which is why he has been asked to investigate a baffling thirty-year run of suicides and suspiciously random accidents that has thinned the ranks of this very select group of gentlemen.

Detective Chief Inspector Roberta Steel got caught fitting up Jack Wallace - that's why they demoted her and quashed his sentence. Now he's back on the streets, and women are being attacked again. Wallace has to be responsible, but if Detective Sergeant Steel goes anywhere near him, his lawyers will get her thrown off the force for good. The Powers That Be won't listen to her, not after what happened last time. According to them, she's got more than enough ongoing cases to keep her busy.

Once Joe Kurtz needed revenge - and revenge cost him 11 years in Attica prison. Now Kurtz needs a job, and the price is going to be higher. Out of prison, out of touch, Kurtz signs on with the Byron Farino, Don of a Mob family whose son Kurtz had been protecting on the inside. Farino enlists Kurtz's help to track down the Family's missing accountant - a man with too much knowledge of Family business to have on the loose.

At first, Archy McNally was unofficially enlisted to verify the bona fides of a deal for a rare Faberg Imperial egg, created exclusively for the doomed Czar Nicholas in 1917. But when Edythe Westmore's son and daughter become convinced the trinket is a fake and their mother is being conned, McNally is asked to deep-six the whole deal.

Dying billionaire Trevor Stone hires private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaroto find his missing daughter. Grief-stricken over the death of her mother and the impending death of her father, Desiree Stone has been missing for three weeks. So has the first investigator Stone hired to find her: Jay Becker, Patrick's mentor.

Clement Mansell knows how easy it is to get away with murder. The seriously crazed killer is already back on the Detroit streets - thanks to some nifty courtroom moves by his crafty looker of a lawyer - and he's feeling invincible enough to execute a crooked Motown judge on a whim. Homicide Detective Raymond Cruz thinks the "Oklahoma Wildman" crossed the line long before this latest outrage, and he's determined to see that the hayseed psycho does not slip through the legal system's loopholes a second time.

If there’s one thing Hap Collins and Leonard Pine like, it’s trouble - and they especially like getting paid to find it. So when their friend and sometime boss Marvin Harmon asks the boys to look into a cold-case double homicide, they’re happy to oblige. It turns out that both victims were set to inherit some serious money, and one of them ran with an honest-to-goodness vampire cult. The more closely Hap and Leonard look over the crime-scene photos, the more trouble they see.

Fritz Brown’s L.A. - and his life - are masses of contradictions, like stirring chorales sung for the dead. A less-than-spotless former cop with a drinking problem - a private-eye-cum-repo man with a taste for great music - he has been known to wallow in the grime beneath the Hollywood glitter. But Fritz Brown’s life is about to change, thanks to the appearance of a racist psycho who flashes too much cash for a golf caddie and who walked away clean from a multiple murder rap.

Isaiah Coleridge is a mob enforcer in Alaska - he's tough, seen a lot, and dished out more. But when he forcibly ends the money-making scheme of a made man, he gets in the kind of trouble that can lead to a bullet behind the ear. Saved by the grace of his boss and exiled to upstate New York, Isaiah begins a new life, a quiet life without gunshots or explosions. Except a teenage girl disappears, and Isaiah isn't one to let that slip by. And delving into the underworld to track this missing girl will get him exactly the kind of notice he was warned to avoid.

Some things never change. With his new villa, Falco also gets a timeless headache: building contractors. After the departure of two shady plasterers, a rank odor in the bathhouse soon leads to the discovery of a corpse under the mosaic floor. Should Falco follow the culprits to remote Britannica? Despite the British weather (damp), the inhabitants (barbarians), and the wine (second-rate), Falco takes his whole family and goes. In veritas, Falco has another, secret reason for this exodus.

Their daughter goes missing and they don't call the cops? That’s one of many intriguing mysteries deliciously and intricately layered in this audiobook. Layer upon layer, twist upon twist, secret upon secret, this is a case tailor-made for a Sherlock Holmes devotee like private investigator Joey Mancuso. The ruthless kidnappers have something huge to cover up…an operation involving stolen art that’s being used to finance one of the greatest evils on the planet.

Zoey has only ever known a world with few women and a society capable of unimaginable evil. Now she's about to learn she may be the only hope it has for salvation. After she and her companions flee a vicious attack, barely escaping with their lives, Zoey finds herself faced with a new threat: video evidence suggesting she is the mother of an unborn baby girl - and the key to mankind's survival. Knowing that her former captors will stop at nothing to control the power that lies within her, Zoey sets out on her own for the last American city, Seattle, in search of answers.

It's been a year of change for Gideon and Sirius. Both are new parents, but for the two of them, the joys of fatherhood have to wait. After a few months of silence, the All-In Killer has begun his murderous spree again - and his latest victim died only miles from Gideon's doorstep. The All-In Killer has made it no secret that his homicidal countdown will end only with the deaths of Gideon and Sirius. When Gideon decides he can no longer hide the encroaching threat from his wife, they prepare together for the approaching storm.

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.

Love. Violence. Destiny. These powerful themes ricochet through Lorenzo Carcaterra's new novel like bullets from a machine gun. In Gangster, he surpasses even his best-selling Sleepers to create a brutal and brilliant American saga of murder, forgiveness, and redemption.

Hap Collins looks like a good ol’ boy. But even in his misspent youth, his best pal is Leonard Pine, who is Black, gay, and the ultimate outsider. Inseparable friends, Hap and Leonard climb into the boxing ring, visit their families, get in bar fights, and just go fishing - all the while confronting racists, righting wrongs, and eating a whole lot of delicious food.