She's the antihero the city needs, hidden in plain sight, with the perfect double life. But the past is catching up to her and it's not going to be pretty...Betty Jones has a dark past, which she paints away each day with Avon cosmetics and a bright smile. She's created a new life with her picture-perfect family, but old scars are beginning to itch.When a series of heists leave a trail of dead soldiers and missing military cargo, Betty recognizes the calling card of her past demons. Blessed with gifts that make her more than human, Betty is unable to live with the continuing existence of the people who once ruined her, so she embarks on a cold-blooded vigilante mission to be rid of them once and for all. But her enemies are closing in, and Betty's perfect life is beginning to crack.

    Adel has no choice but to accept, and soon is on the trail of a serial killer targeting women living on the fringe of society.Navigating temptations from his old life, dirty NOPD cops, and friends who turn to enemies in the delta heat, Adel must find the killer or end up framed for murder.Praise for Under the Dixie Moon:“Ro Cuzon is among the rising stars of the new generation of noir novelists who are moving the form forward in exciting, innovative ways.”George Pelecanos“New Orleans is a postcard city, but Ro somehow gets under its skin. One of the best new voices in crime fiction.”Sean Chercover“A no-holds-barred, sexy and violent noir with a liberal dash of NOLA. It delivers an unblinking look at the dirty underbelly of a corrupt society, complete with ugly consequences and melancholy endings.”Library Journal, Staff Pick for Best Books of the Year“Ro Cuzon has written one of the freshest PI novels in years.”Spinetingler Magazine“Smoking hot New Orleans noir.”Mark T. Conard

    Part government, gang, and power company, 8th Street tasks Samuel Parrish with keeping the city clear of meth and bootleg liquor. Most nights, Samuel tracks down criminals, while others find him navigating hazier avenues: in between drinking and fighting, he’s falling for his best friend’s girl. But when Samuel rousts a well-connected dealer, he uncovers a secret that threatens to put the city back in the dark.

    The Untamed State. True now more than ever, since the Thunderbird Highway closed and civilization fled. Now Montezuma is a ghost state, a haven for the lawless where only the most savage thrive.Mai is on the run from the law herself, driving down the abandoned highway through the desert, to the mountains where she was born. When her Bronco breaks down in the near-dead town of Maquina, she quickly makes several ruthless enemies trying to get back on the road. She also makes one friend, a laid-back bartender whose easy charm threatens to distract her from what she means to do. Mai is tough and she’s smart, but is that enough to get back on the road and survive the Untamed State?Coyote is a hard-hitting neo-western, best enjoyed in a cheap roadside motel or in the corner booth of a dim dive bar with whiskey.

    Library of America caps its three-volume edition of Leonard’s crime novels—prepared in consultation with the author before his death in 2013 and edited by his longtime researcher, Gregg Sutter—with this final installment gathering four wickedly funny and wildly inventive books from the 1990s and early 2000s, the period when his novels were discovered by some of Hollywood’s leading filmmakers. These later works explore new terrain (including Hollywood itself), and enliven Leonard’s fictional universe with a succession of vividly imagined denizens, a tumultuous and expressive crew whom he delights in setting on intricate collision courses.In Get Shorty (1990), a Miami loan shark hits on a way to break into Hollywood as a producer. Drawing on his long history in the film industry, Leonard offers up a sharp-edged satiric tour of the studios, gleefully demonstrating a professional criminal’s natural affinity for the scams of show business. Perhaps the funniest of Leonard’s novels, Get Shorty was memorably filmed with John Travolta and Gene Hackman. Rum Punch (1992) fields a complex story involving drug dealers, Federal agents, and an airline stewardess under pressure. Its bittersweet center is Max Cherry, a West Palm Beach bail bondsman with heart and integrity who, in a way he could not have anticipated, is challenged to start over again in middle age. The source for Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Rum Punch is both a superb caper and a wry and melancholy meditation on the hazards of staying honest and the stresses of getting older. A real-life prison break provided the impetus for Out of Sight (1996). In this high-risk fusion of violent adventure and unlikely romance, Jack Foley, a career bank robber, and Karen Sisco, a deputy U.S. marshal, are flung together under unusual circumstances and embark on a manhunt that leads through Florida and back to Leonard’s original literary haunt, Detroit. Included as a special feature is “Karen Makes Out,” the story in which Leonard first introduced Sisco. Inspired by the subculture of Civil War reenactments, Leonard made it the background for Tishomingo Blues (2002), an exuberant tale in which a young high-diving daredevil, a washed-up ballplayer, and an assortment of heavies and tricksters both local and from out of town come together in Tunica—“the Las Vegas of the South”—to relive the Battle of Brice’s Cross Roads. This volume contains a newly researched chronology of Leonard’s life making use of materials in his personal archive, detailed annotations, and an account by editor Gregg Sutter of the research that went into the writing of these novels. A Detroit native, Sutter first met Elmore Leonard in 1979 and began working for him in 1981. He is currently at work on a biography of Leonard, from his unique perspective as his full-time researcher for more than thirty years.

    Included are such suspense classics as "Guillotine," "Cigarette," "All At Once, No Alice," "The Hummingbird Comes Home," and the classic "The Heavy Sugar."

    As the ruins smolder, the case-hardened operative from the Continental Detective Agency is the one person determined to untangle the tough questions: Who tossed the match and why? Was it an angry neighbor, a disgruntled servant, or the old man in the window who was seen giving one last look at the world before the fire consumed him? In the wreckage of the ruined house, the Continental Op will find that nothing burns hotter than greed.   “Arson Plus” is the story that introduced the world to the Continental Op, the nameless detective whom Dashiell Hammett described as “a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit—as callous and brutal and cynical as necessary” (William F. Nolan, Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook). Born in the pages of Black Mask in 1923, the Continental Op is ageless, a hardworking hero as much for our time as he is for his own. Rediscover the early stories of the original hardboiled detective in the first volume of the Collected Case Files of the Continental Op, featuring “Arson Plus,” “Slippery Fingers,” and “Crooked Souls.”

    Handy with a gun, and always willing to take a roundhouse to the chin, the Op is the toughest sleuth San Francisco has ever seen. And when a rich Englishwoman hires him to find her estranged husband, the Op thinks he’s in for an easy job. But the husband is an addict last seen in Tijuana, and finding him will take the hardboiled detective past the border and into a hellhole called the Golden Horseshoe.   Before Nick Charles or Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett made his mark with the adventures of the Continental Op, whose particular brand of justice defined the legendary Black Mask style. In “The Golden Horseshoe,” “The House in Turk Street,” and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes,” the Op follows his cases from civility to temptation and back again.

    But he’s a man obsessed, methodically hunting down the gang members who murdered his family, and Big Jim Kimbrough, his latest target, isn’t far from the hell-blazing inferno. In a surprise turn, Kimbrough gets the jump on The Lawyer and leaves him for dead; though fortune is in his corner when a trio of frontier women find him and nurse him back to health. It’s not long before Kimbrough learns The Lawyer is still alive. Desperate to rub out the man who’s been dogging him, the outlaw goes gunning for The Lawyer again, determined this time to finish the job. Eric Beetner (The Year I Died Seven Times) writes the Old West with the same terse, action-packed grit as his crime fiction. BLOOD MOON is his second riveting “Lawyer” tale following the highly praised Six Guns at Sundown.

    Two gunmen burst through the door, instigating a scuffle that leaves Main dead, his wife unconscious, and the money long gone. At least, that’s the way the cops tell it. The police see no other way the killers could have escaped so easily, and the case falls to the Continental Op—San Francisco’s most ruthless private detective. Behind this strange murder lurks a toxic case of greed, and the Op must risk his neck to learn who pulled the trigger.   “The Main Death” is vintage Dashiell Hammett, the sort of hard-driving tale that made him a legend and made Black Mask the most respected of all the pulp magazines. Paired with “This King Business” in this captivating collection of Hammett’s later Continental Op stories, it is a fine reminder that hardboiled action never goes out of style.  Praise for Dashiell Hammett “Hammett was the ace performer. . . . He did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” —Raymond Chandler, author of The Big Sleep   “Hammett was the great poet of the great American collision—personal honour and corruption, opportunity and fatality.” —James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential   “Hammett is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer.” —The Boston Globe

    It includes quotes from such great authors as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Gil, Brewer, Charles Willeford, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Jonathan Latimer, Mickey Spillane, Brett Halliday, Ellery Queen, W. R. Burnett, Paul Cain and Cornell Woolrich. Features over 180 excerpts and 50 paperback covers from the era.