Showing titles in Hard-Boiled

Joe Flood is the professional assassin known as “the Slugger.” He’s made a career out of murder for hire, but only those who deserve it. Then a routine physical turns into a reckoning. Joe has cancer, his doctor tells him, with maybe six months to live. Joe decides to take fate into his own hands. Accessing the underground network of fellow hit men, he puts out a contract on himself: six million dollars from a Swiss bank account to the professional who will end his suffering quickly.

God was calling him, again. He had killed before, helped a girl out of a bad situation. But now God was calling on him to do something bigger. Calling him to show the world that there is only one true God, only one God to be worshipped, and feared. Stillwater Minnesota Police Lieutenant Melanie Jenkins discovered the first message, the grizzly murder of a local banker. But she kept the message to herself, and God didn't like that, sending the killer on another mission to make sure the word gets out. There will be No Other Gods. The killing continues, forcing Jenkins to call for assistance ...

FBI Special Agent Anna Turnipseed, a Modoc Indian from California, and Bureau of Indian Affairs Investigator Emmett Parker, a Comanche from Oklahoma, are a team, sent by the Feds wherever there are problems in tribal territory.

It was supposed to be easy...it turned out to be murder. In the thrilling start to the Trask Brothers Murder Mystery Series, identical twin brothers Dave and Don hunt a silent killer terrorizing anglers in the great north woods. "Spellbinding! I could not put it down. It will keep you on the edge all the way to the end." When Dave Trask ran for sheriff of wild Lake County, he thought the job would entail locating lost campers and catching poachers, and he didn’t really expect to get elected. He was wrong on both counts. Before he can be sworn in, two guests at a small fishing lodge are ...

Burt Reynolds reads three of Robert B. Parker's finest Spenser novels. Includes Chance, Hush Money, and Small Vices.

J. Scott Smart stars as "The Fat Man", Brad Runyon, the stout-but-stalwart investigator who was first conceived as an arch villain in Hammett's classic novel The Maltese Falcon. Charismatic and captivating, Runyon has a way with the ladies, in spite of his 237 pounds. Nick Charles, "The Thin Man", was played on radio by William Powell, Les Damon, and Les Tremayne. Cases seem to fall in to Nick's lap...often dropped there by his wife, Nora (played by Myrna Loy and Claudia Morgan).

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can't stand music, or any loud sounds. He's got a beautiful wife, but he can't get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He's a thinking man's cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there's something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of 20 years.

Here are 12 episodes from the greatest detective shows ever broadcast during the golden age of radio, with the legendary stars that made them great. You'll hear Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Doctor Watson, Sydney Greenstreet as Nero Wolfe, Howard Duff as Sam Spade, Chester Morris as Boston Blackie, Dick Powell as Richard Diamond, and Jack Webb as Dragnet's Sergeant Joe Friday, plus more gumshoes like Philip Marlowe, Bulldog Drummond, Michael Shayne, and Johnny Dollar.

When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain. From the author of The Maltese Falcon.

Once he was a hero of the Great War, and then a member of the dreaded Black House. Now he is the criminal linchpin of Low Town. His name is Warden. He thought he had left the war behind him, but a summons from up above brings the past sharply, uncomfortably, back into focus. General Montgomery's daughter is missing somewhere in Low Town, searching for clues about her brother's murder. The General wants her found, before the stinking streets can lay claim to her, too.

Drugs. Extortion. Slavery. Organized crime is fighting for a hold on John Rebus's peaceful Scotland. And when Rebus rescues a young Bosnian girl forced into prostitution, he breaks a policeman's golden rule to never get personally involved in a case. Add to that the hunt for an elderly Nazi accused of slaughtering an entire French village, and Rebus wonders just how evil humans can be - until his own daughter is mortally injured as a gangland warning for him to back off. Then even a dedicated cop like Rebus might make a deal with the devil to find the culprit. Not for justice. For revenge.

Jake Noble, Special Forces veteran and ex-CIA operative, is living on his boat, trying to scrape together enough money for his mother's cancer treatments. When the Company offers him 150k dollars to track down a missing girl, Noble has no choice but to delve back into the seedy underbelly of Manila's sex trade.

In Leon's fifth Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery, the beating of renowned art historian Dotoressa Brett Lynch draws the contemporary Venetian police detective out of his warm and loving home and into the yearly onslaught of acqua alta, the torrential winter rains. Brett, an American who spearheaded a recent exhibition of Chinese pottery in Venice, lives with her lover, Flavia Petrelli, the reigning diva of La Scala. With his open mind and good sense, Brunetti finds himself more fazed by Flavia's breathtaking talent than by the nontraditional relationship between the two women. Brunetti's deliberate and humane investigation to uncover a motive for Brett's beating takes him to dark, wet corners of Venice and into a sinister web of art theft, fakery, and base human desires.

Deuce Mora—a pulls-no-punches columnist and meticulous detective—keeps turning up information, bit by bit, only to find some Fed in her face, at her door, emerging from the shadows, always guarding the edges of the story, insisting it will not be told. Yes, the Feds are aware of the trafficking ring. Yes, they have a plan to move on it. No, Deuce can’t be told about the plan, and under no circumstances can she write about its existence.

Forty years’ accumulation of art, antiques, and family photographs are more than just objects for Stanley Peke - they are proof of a life fully lived. A life he could have easily lost long ago. When a con man steals his houseful of possessions in a sophisticated moving-day scam, Peke wanders helplessly through his empty New England home, inevitably reminded of another helpless time: decades in Peke’s past, a cold and threadbare Stanislaw Shmuel Pecoskowitz eked out a desperate existence in the war-torn Polish countryside, subsisting on scraps, dodging Nazi soldiers.

Jeff Resnick hardly knew his well-heeled half-brother. But after suffering a fractured skull in a vicious mugging, he reluctantly accepts the fact that he has a long and brutal recovery to face - and his closest of kin can provide him with the time and place to do it. Now, Jeff is haunted by unexplained visions of a heinous crime - a banker, stalked, killed, and eviscerated like a 10-point buck. When Matt Sumner's murder is discovered, a still-recovering Jeff realizes this was what he had seen. Jeff must not only convince himself of his new-found psychic ability, but also his skeptical brother, Richard Alpert.

When you’re the editor of a successful investigative journal, you don’t dash around Scotland chasing after loch monsters. But Gill McArdle didn’t believe in unicorns either, and speaking honestly, he was fortunate to walk away from that one. He’s a scientist, and not one of the wild-eyed optimists spending their days, scanning the loch for a creature. And here’s his problem. With every passing hour, evidence mounts that something is stirring.

Henry "Hank" Thompson's got a good thing going - a hut on a quiet Mexican beach, morning swims, a nice breakfast place a few miles down shore…until a backpacker with a Russian accent shows up and starts asking questions about his past. Questions Hank doesn't want to deal with. And then the backpacker mentions the money…and Hank's parents. So Hank makes a fateful move…because no one threatens Hank's family.

Xavier “Priest” Priestly is a snarky former seminarian turned private investigator. Dusty Queen is a hard-as-nails professional stuntwoman and freelance bodyguard. When Dusty’s girlfriend suddenly disappears, a woman in a strange blue wig tries to assassinate Priest, and a twelve-year-old boy shows up claiming to be his son, the two friends are thrown into a maelstrom of intrigue and high-stakes violence that’s as convoluted and dangerous as it is hilarious. Thankfully, Priest and Dusty don’t have to navigate these tangled mysteries alone.

When the body of a local boat tour operator is found on the beach beside Llandudno Pier, it seems that her murder might be linked to an ongoing rivalry with a new boat tour company. However, when it is discovered that the victim had recently started a relationship with a much younger man, the focus of the investigation changes.