Crime and mystery: hard-boiled crime, noir fiction

Quick Before They Catch Us

Mark Timlin

Family trouble! Growing old quietly was never really an option for Nick Sharman. When he takes on a job for a prosperous Manchester businessman looking for his runaway teenage daughter, Meena, he should, perhaps, have known better….

The Resurrectionist

Jack O'Connell

Your only child is lost between this world and the next, and more than anything you want him back. A controversial doctor and a mysterious stranger claim they have the answer. Who do you trust? Are you willing to risk everything? Are you prepared to enter Limbo?…

Word Made Flesh

Jack O'Connell

Why would two Eastern European meatboys want to whack an innocent cab driver? That’s the question that occurs to Gilrein as Raban and Blumfeld press the gun barrel into his mouth. Does it have something to do with the ritual death-by-flencing of Leo Tani? Or does the answer involve Gilrein’s ex-lover, now working as a librarian for a…

Robert B. Parker’s Kickback

Ace Atkins

What started out as a joke landed seventeen-year-old Dillon Yates in a lockdown juvenile facility in Boston Harbor. When he set up a prank twitter account for his vice principal, he never dreamed he could be brought up on criminal charges, but that’s exactly what happened. This is Blackburn, Massachusetts, where zero tolerance for…

Wireless

Jack O'Connell

The scene is Quinsigamond, a decaying New England factory town, a model locale of turn-of-the-century chaos. An activist priest meets a grisly death in his own cathedral. The crime has all the hallmarks of a routine Bangkok Park gang killing. But the perp is no everyday low-life but a demented ex-FBI agent named Speer in search of the…

Robert B. Parker’s Blind Spot

Reed Farrel Coleman

It’s been a long time since Jesse Stone left LA, and still longer since the tragic injury that ruined his chances for a major league baseball career. When Jesse is invited to a reunion of his old Triple-A team at a hip New York city hotel, he is forced to grapple with his memories and regrets over what might have been….

Find My Way Home

Mark Timlin

Harry Stonehouse had been a cop, a good one – and straight, unlike Nick Sharman. After taking early retirement he’d landed a job at a security firm. Now he’s dead, and his wife wants Nick to find out who killed him and why….

Paint it Black

Mark Timlin

Nick Sharman – at last – is living a life of married bliss with his new partner (and ex-stripper) Dawn. The bad boy has settled down, and the booze and the drugs and the guns are but a happy memory – unlike his ex-wife Laura, now married to respectability. Laura’s quite capable of shattering the idyll, but this time it’s serious – their…

The House of Wolfe

James Carlos Blake

On a rainy winter night in Mexico City, a ten-member wedding party is kidnapped in front of the groom’s family mansion. The perpetrator is a small-time gangster named El Galan, who wants nothing more than to make his crew part of a major cartel and hopes that this crime will be his big break. He sets the wedding party’s ransom at five…

Intercourse

Robert Olen Butler

What goes through the mind of a person while having sex? Acclaimed story teller Robert Olen Butler turns his daring imagination to the intimate in his latest collection that both dazzles and probes. He lays bare the most flagrant, personal thoughts and feelings of fifty often surprsing couples. The author’s meitculous research reveals…

Severance

Robert Olen Butler

The human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes after decapitation. In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by the intersection of these two seemingly unrelated concepts, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler wrote sixty-two…

Ashes By Now

Mark Timlin

When a police officer’s daughter was found raped and murdered, Sailor Grant, the local nonce, was sent down. Sharman always had his doubts, but that part of his life is over. Now, Sailor is out of prison and keeps phoning Sharman to help him get justice, but Nick wants to be left alone. When Sailor is found dead and Sharman is half…