Noir Fiction

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.

This book contains 101 bite-sized horror stories that are intended to scare and unsettle you. These are real peoples' accounts of the creepy and the occult - of their near-misses with madmen and paranormal entities. Each chapter is a short, stand alone campfire tale, a retelling of a frightening or gruesome incident that has stuck with the teller, something that gives them pause to this day when they find themselves alone in the dark. These stories have been collected with the knowledge that real life is scarier than fiction.

Prison buddies Billy Good and Jackie Walker made time pulling small jobs here and there. Not a bad living if you liked scraping by. The thing to worry about was the next fix. Nothing else mattered. When Billy and Jackie fell in with Kenyatta, a ghetto lord ready to take back the streets, they thought they'd hit the big time. Dealing with drug pushers and crooked cops in the name of justice sure felt good, but in a world where "kindness was the sweetest con of all", every bullet fired echoed with the sound of payback.

Dark City expands with new chapters and a fresh collection of restored photos that illustrate the mythic landscape of the imagination. It's a place where the men and women who created film noir often find themselves dangling from the same sinister heights as the silver-screen avatars to whom they gave life.

The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op's most bizarre cases, and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.

Someone is committing random murders across Chicago—and making sure detectives Billy Harney (Aaron Paul) and Patti Harney (Krysten Ritter) are first on the crime scene. What connects the victims, and why is the killer leaving clues behind with each body? Billy and Patti are scrambling to stop the next killing when their father, Chief of Detectives Dan Harney (Beau Bridges), is kidnapped. But in their race to track him down, they uncover pieces of his past that simply can’t be true. Could their own flesh and blood be covering up a dark secret?

It's 1985, and Joe Stone is excited to be joining his old school friend, and lifelong crush, Chris, for a long weekend in London's Soho—home to a vibrant, developing gay scene, and a million miles from the small town where Joe and Chris grew up. When Chris is found brutally murdered, the police write his death off as just another rent boy fallen foul of a bad hook up. But Joe knows his friend was killed deliberately, and joins forces with former police detective, Russell Dixon—Chris's flatmate—to find out why.

Gold Dagger Award winner Arnaldur Indridason’s novels featuring Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson became international sensations on their way to selling millions of copies worldwide. The debut of morose detective Sveinsson finds the inspector and his team delving into the murder of a retiree with horrifying secrets.

All around Albuquerque, New Mexico, young women are going missing, seemingly vanished into thin air. With no link between the victims, Detective Alyssa Wyatt is quickly plunged into a horrifying case with no obvious clues. And when Jersey Andrews, the best friend of Alyssa's teenage daughter, Holly, joins the list of vanished girls, the case becomes personal. But this investigation will lead Alyssa and partner Cord into the most sinister depths of humanity; an evil place where life is expendable and where the depraved can fulfill their darkest desires - if they have the money.

In 1995, James Ellroy’s novel American Tabloid shocked the world with its gritty reimagining of the events leading up to the JFK assassination. Now, an all-star cast brings Ellroy’s masterwork to life in this gripping new audio adaptation.

Identical twins Amelia and Camelia Hall were born with the same face, and that’s about it: By the time the girls were through school, the matching set of names could no longer contain them. But the bond between the sisters is deep and unshakable - Cam serves as the maid of honor on Lia’s wedding day and as her attorney 15 years later, when Lia’s life and the lives of her two teenage daughters are rocked by divorce.

It's 1987, and Soho is in the grip of another hot summer. While working part-time in The Red Lion, Joe finds himself agreeing to help a notorious gangster search for her missing girlfriend. Antonia The Gecko Lagorio is daughter to the ruthless but ageing gang boss, Tony The Lizard Lagorio. When her girlfriend, Charlotte Fenwick, goes missing, Antonia turns to Joe for help, believing her to have been kidnapped by a rival gang.

When overwhelmed stay-at-home mom Alexis finds herself at odds with her husband after she’s charged with a DUI, she is given one chance to get her family back: complete AA and admit her faults. The problem is, she’s never had a drinking problem and has no idea what caused the blackout that led to her arrest. Still, she’s committed to working through the program, if that’s what it takes to be reunited with her two young children. But when she connects with a new friend, Farrah, she’s empowered to take a closer look at her husband’s role in her downfall.

On the 12th floor of the Acme Building, on a cold February day in St. Paul, Guy Noir looks down the barrel of a loaded revolver in the hands of geezer gangster Joey Roast Beef, who is demanding to hear what lucrative scheme Guy is cooking up with stripper-turned-women's-studies-professor Naomi Fallopian. Everyone wants to know, and Guy faces them one by one, as he and Naomi pursue a dream of earning gazillions by selling a surefire method of dramatic weight loss.

One of the 20th-century's most darkly beautiful works of crime fiction - a story of carny life, spiritualism, and a con man of merciless resolve.

Motherhood isn’t easy, especially when you’re a mother of a Black son. Ten years ago, Cheryl jumped at the chance to send her son, Javonte, to an exclusive boarding school in New England - far away from Atlanta and the violence of the city streets. It was the American dream, or was it? Now settled in Vermont, Javonte is married and well-employed, but Cheryl hardly ever sees him, and when she does, her own son seems like someone she only used to know.

With the Japanese Imperium at war with the Soviet Union, and the United States watching cautiously on the sidelines, Second Lieutenant Joe Sullivan of the U.S. Marines is sent on a dangerous mission to Tokyo. The Russians have Summoned a demon of epic proportions to attack the city, and all that stands in its deadly path is an untested Japanese super-robot. Now, Joe is at the controls, his gravity-spiking Power at the ready. But that is one huge, mean Demon....

It's 1986, and Adam Cave, lead singer of the pop sensation Loose Lips, is struggling to stay in the closet, especially as his group is going through a messy split, and media speculation about the reasons behind the break up are high. Joe Stone has been assigned to Adam as a runner for the behind-the-scenes, warts and all expose of the recording of the band's last album, and an unlikely friendship begins to form.

It's Christmas Eve, 1988 and Russell and Joe are among the guests at a lavish party in a celebrity mansion in the heart of Soho. Television presenter and national treasure, Nathan Bentley has a formidable reputation for legendary parties—with wall-to-wall celebrities, drink flowing, drugs, dancing, ill-tempered Cordon-Bleu chefs laying on the food and world famous musicians providing the entertainment. What could be better for a bunch of waifs and strays on Christmas Eve?

Type Hard. Type Fast. Make Dough. That was the formula of old-school pulp fiction—plot-driven, popular and gobbled up by a reading public hungry for more. And it produced many writers who hammered out a living selling “cash-and-carry” stories and novels. Some of these writers were among the best America has ever produced. Writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and John D. MacDonald. Others are numbered among the bestselling authors of all time, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Lester Dent, and Frederick Faust (better known by his pen name, Max Brand). What were the secrets of ...