Books

Fast One

Paul Cain

Fast One is possibly the toughest tough-guy and most brutal gangster story ever written. Set in Depression Los Angeles it has a surreal quality that is positively hypnotic. It is the saga of gunman-gambler Gerry Kells and his dipso lover S. Granquist (she has no first name), who rearrange the LA underworld and “disappear” in an…

Last Bus to Coffeeville

J P Henderson

Nancy Skidmore has Alzheimer’s and her oldest friend Eugene Chaney III once more a purpose in life – to end hers. When the moment for Gene to take Nancy to her desired death in Coffeeville arrives, she is unexpectedly admitted to the secure unit of a nursing home and he has to call upon his two remaining friends to help break her out…

Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland

Ace Atkins

Henry Cimoli and Spenser have been friends for years, yet the old boxing trainer has never asked the private eye for a favor. Until now. A heavy-handed developer is trying to buy up Henry’s condo on Revere Beach and sends thugs to move the process along. Soon Spenser and his apprentice, Zebulon Sixkill, find a trail leading to a…

The Marijuana Chronicles

Jonathan Santlofer

Marijuana is the everyman drug. Teenagers surreptitiously toke on it, politicians refuse to inhale it, even your mum and dad have had a go. Marijuana is a mellow, let’s put on a Barry Manilow CD, open a bottle of vino, and order a pizza drug. It’s the easy drug. The no howling at the moon drug. No shooting up and losing your job….

Shrink Rap

Robert B Parker

Melanie Joan Hall is a best-selling author in a bind. Her publisher needs her to tour on behalf of her newest blockbuster, and Melanie Joan needs a bodyguard-cum-escort to protect her from an overbearing psychotherapist ex-husband whose presence unnerves her to the point of hysteria. Step in P. I. Sunny Randall….

Potshot

Robert B Parker

Boston PI Spenser returns – heading west to the rich man’s haven of Potshot, Arizona, a former mining town reborn as a paradise for Los Angeles millionaires looking for a place to escape the pressures of their high-flying lifestyles. Potshot overcame its rough reputation as a rendezvous for old-time mountain men who lived off the land,…

Spare Change

Robert B Parker

When a serial murderer dubbed “The Spare Change Killer” by the Boston press surfaces after three decades in hiding, the police immediately seek out the cop, now retired, who headed the original task force: Phil Randall. As a sharp-eyed investigator and a doting parent (“You’re smart. You’re tough. You, too, are a paradigm of law…

Dream Girl

Robert B Parker

When a mature, beautiful and composed April Kyle strides into Spenser’s office, the Boston PI barely hesitates before recognizing his once and future client. Now a well-established madam herself, April oversees an upscale call girl operation in Boston’s Back Bay. Still looking for Spenser’s approval, it takes her a moment before she can…

School Days

Robert B Parker

Lily Ellsworth – erect, firm, white-haired and stylish – is the grand dame of Dowling, Massachusetts, and possesses an iron will and a bottomless purse. When she hires Spenser to investigate her grandson Jared Clark’s alleged involvement in a school shooting, Spenser is led into an investigation that grows more harrowing at every turn….

Silent Night

Robert B Parker

It’s December in Boston, and Spenser is busy planning the menu for Christmas dinner when he’s confronted in his office by a young boy named Slide……

The Hard Drug Chronicles

Gary Phillips

From Cocaine, that most troubling and fascinating of substances; through Speed, an oft demonized and misunderstood drug and on to Heroin, long seen as the most ‘literary’ of narcotics – the contributors to this all-new original anthology reveal that those who partake are forever changed, but the price of paradise is often steep….

Test of Resolve

Peter Murphy

A denounced President, her kidnapped daughter, a Hindu extremist group and the threat of nuclear war: America is once again thrown into turmoil in Peter Murphy’s sequel to Removal….

Fatal Act

Leigh Russell

How far would you go to find a murderer? DI Geraldine Steel, known for pushing the boundaries of her position in the name of justice, is on the hunt for a conviction, even if it threatens her life. A glamorous young TV soap star dies in a car crash but despite the severity of the incident, the driver of the second vehicle has somehow…

The Hunter and Other Stories

Dashiell Hammett

A new collection of crime stories from the legendary hard-boiled writer Dashiell Hammett. The author of classic novels The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon, Hammett has been called ‘a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer’ (The Boston Globe), while Raymond Chandler raved that Hammett…

Others of my Kind

James Sallis

At age eight, Jenny Rowan was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath her captor’s bed. Eventually she escaped and, after living for eighteen months on cast-offs at the local mall, was put into the child-care system. Suing for emancipation, at age sixteen she became a legal adult. Nowadays she works as a production editor for…

The Heroin Chronicles

Jerry Stahl

That most “literary” of narcotics – the enigmatic opium poppy and its various derivatives – and as these stories reveal, those who partake of the sacred flower are forever changed, but the price of paradise is often steep: overdose, hepatitis C, degradation and self-destruction….