Crime and mystery: hard-boiled crime, noir fiction

Take the A-Train

Mark Timlin

Nick Sharman is in traction, hospitalised for four months, and desperate for a distraction. Then Fiona arrives – a topless model for the tabloids who bullies him into convalescing in her flat in Camberwell……

Lie in the Dark

Dan Fesperman

Investigator Petric makes his living from the dead. Lately business has been slow, what with the siege around Sarajevo. Condoned killing has displaced the crime of passion; his services with the civil police as a homicide investigator have been less in demand. Unluckily one premeditated death does land on the detective’s desk….

Dog Eat Dog

Edward Bunker

Dog Eat Dog is the tale of three unremorseful criminals with two felony convictions apiece and no more chances….

No Beast So Fierce

Edward Bunker

An angry and mercilessly suspenseful novel about an ex-con’s attempt to negotiate the “straight world” and his swan dive back into the paradoxical security of crime. It is airtight in its construction, almost photorealistic in its portrayal of L.A. lowlife and utterly knowledgeable about the terrors of liberty, the high of the quick…

The Killer Is Dying

James Sallis

A hired killer on his final job; a burned-out detective whose wife is dying slowly and in agony; a young boy abandoned by his parents and living alone by his wits. Three people, solitary and disconnected from society….

Kusanagi

Clem Chambers

Kusanagi, the priceless sword of the Japanese crown jewels, that must be at the coronation of every Japanese emperor, is missing. Fate, ambition and greed come together in the search for Kusanagi – a prize of such incalculable value that it carves a trail of destruction from Tokyo to London to all those who covet it….

Big Machine

Victor LaValle

Ricky Rice is a middle-aged hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind. The sole survivor of a suicide cult, he spends his days scraping by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter arrives, reminding him of a vow he once made and summoning him to Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom …

Death Row Breakout Stories

Edward Bunker

Death Row Breakout Stories brings together seven previously unseen short stories that draw fully on Edward Bunker’s incomparable experience of the U.S. prison system. – as James Ellroy says `by an ex-criminal, from the unregenerately criminal viewpoint…’…

Little Boy Blue

Edward Bunker

Young Alex Hamilton is intelligent and independent but given to sudden fits of violent rage. Rebellious since his parents split up, Alex is constantly absconding from foster homes and institutions to be with his father, a broken man who can’t give his son the home he desperately needs….

Stark

Edward Bunker

Oceanview, Los Angeles, 1962. Stark is a rat and a con-artist. Nobody’s friend. The kind of guy Eddie Bunker met in San Quentin. Stark thinks he can beat the suckers and outsmart the cops. When a big score comes his way, he’s lucky to escape with his life. Four others are not so lucky….

The Trudeau Vector

Juris Jurjevics

As the international team of scientists at the spectacular Trudeau Research Center prepares for six months of unrelenting winter, three of their colleagues are found dead on the ice, their pupils missing, their bodies contorted in ghastly, unnatural positions, hardened from the inside out. Cause of death: unknown. Dr. Jessica Hanley,…

Playing For Thrills

Wang Shuo

Playing for Thrills follows the investigation of a mysterious murder of a possibly imaginary character that took place more than 10 years before. The chief suspect is the narrator of the novel who may or may not have committed the crime – even he isn’t sure….