We first meet ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts.) The Olympic Games are about to start; some of Bernie's Jewish friends are beginning to realize that they should have left while they could; and Gunther himself has been hired to look into two murders that reach high into the Nazi Party. In The Pale Criminal, it's 1938, and Gunther has been blackmailed into rejoining the police by Heydrich himself. And in A German Requiem, the saddest and most disturbing of the three books, it's 1947 as Gunther stumbles across a nightmare landscape that conceals even more death than he imagines. (For a review of Kerr's latest novel, The Grid, see our Thrillers section.)

    For Shella is nothing less than a tour of evil's spawning ground, conducted by one of its natural predators.He is called "Ghost" because he is so nondescript as to be invisible and because he slays with such reflexive ease that he might be one of the dead. Once he traveled with a woman who was called "Shella" -- because those who had treated her as a horrendously ill-used child had tried to make her come out of her shell. Now Shella has vanished in a wilderness of strip clubs and peep shows, and Ghost is looking for her, guided by a killer's instinct and the recognition that can only exist between two people who have been damaged past the point of no return. The result is Andrew Vachss's most compelling work to date, the thriller reimagined as a bleak romance of the damned.

    He evokes his doomed world of New York's Spanish Harlem. The sequel, After Hours, a longer, darker tale, shows Carlito, older and wiser, trying to get out of his life of crime.

    Continuing the magical story of Jose Daniel Fierro, begun in Taibo's critically acclaimed Life Itself, this brilliantly crafted collage of noir adventure and political, psychological drama chronicles the effects of a century of violence on the nature of the imagination."

    This man and his teachings have been responsible for transforming the lives of millions of black men and women, many of whom this society has rejected as incorrigible, irredeemable, irreformable, irretrievable, hopeless and lost. Yet, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, with the Word of Allah (God), has been able to initiate the process of our salvation, redemption and resurrection, which continues to this day.... This book is humbly submitted as a torchlight for guiding the country out from its present condition toward a more peaceful and productive society in which mutual respect governs the relations between the diverse members of America. --- excerpts from book's Preface

    The three novels included in this volume are Musical Chairs, Frequent Flyer, and Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola.

    Life is sweeter in the fortified elite Hill section where the privileged few live, but elsewhere the city makes its own rules for life and death.Even in this ruthless, anything-goes world, Jake Strait has his limits-a line that he won't cross willingly. He won't do political jobs. But when a rich, pampered couple from Hill sets him up, he is drawn into a plot that plans to drench the city with blood.

    This novel recounts scores of stories: of HoTLoVe, OMO, AO-1; of a pygmy hunt, an assassination, a crucifixion; of a human blood bank and a man with metal in his head and a dentist with nasty habits; of sick sex, ill winds, malignant diseases; of the Voys, the Halals, the Puppymen. Most of all it tells the story of a flaky pyrotechnicist, Guy Vallender, and of his four progeny, chief among them Poor Eddie, who was quarry, whose gifts were otherwordly, whose gruesome fate was perhaps transcendent. The action stretches seamlessly between the mid 40s and the mid 70s; its many topographies include Brussels, Salisbury, the Teutoburgerwald, the Congo, the industrial wastes of Lorraine. But the dominant setting is the titular city -- a nightmarish brick grid set on mud a populated by garish freaks. It is here that the characters move to their unique and inexorable ends, fuelled by the bad faith of the former comedian Ray Butt's Church Of The Best Ever Redemption and by the bad blood of the gerontophiliac Jean-Marie. POMPEY is a witty, gripping, emotionally harrowing work by our