The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes


John Joseph AdamsTanith Lee - 2009
    This reprint anthology showcases the best Holmes short fiction from the last 25 years, featuring stories by such visionaries as Stephen King, Neil Gaimen, Laura King, and many others.

The Simple Art of Murder


Raymond Chandler - 1944
    Contains Chandler's essay on the art of detective stories and a collection of 8 classic Chandler mysteries.

The Thieves of Manhattan


Adam Langer - 2010
    Ian Minot is an aspiring writer who labors over short stories that seem destined to remain unread. His beautiful Romanian girlfriend, Anya Petrescu, finds success more easily—and leaves Ian for Blade Markham, a bloviating ex-gangbanger whose “so-called memoir” is a best-seller. When Ian is approached by ex-editor Jed Roth, who wants Ian to publish Jed’s pulpy tale of book theft and murder as a memoir, then renounce it, it’s a chance for both of them to get revenge: Jed on his former employer, and Ian on the world. Although Langer may be too cute for some (he employs made-up slang in which a penis is a portnoy), he does an engaging job with the hall-of-mirrors plot. And if readers can predict that the book they’re reading is the one that Ian ends up writing, they’ll never guess the ending. Just when you want a surprising twist, Langer delivers several.

One Night Stands and Lost Weekends


Lawrence Block - 1999
    It was published, and the rest is history.One Night Stands and Lost Weekends is a sterling collection of short crime fiction and suspense novelettes penned between 1958 and 1962 by a budding young master and soon-to-be Grand Master—an essential slice of genre history, and more fun than a high-speed police chase following a bank job gone bad.

Cathedral


Nelson DeMille - 1981
    Everyone is celebrating but everyone is in for the shock of his life. Born into the heat and hatred of the Northern Ireland conflict, IRA man Brian Flynn has masterminded a brilliant terrorist act - the seizure of Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Among his hostages: the woman Brian Flynn once loved, a former terrorist turned peace activist. Among his enemies: an Irish-American police lieutenant fighting against a traitor inside his own ranks and a shadowy British intelligence officer pursuing his own cynical, bloody plan. The cops face a booby-trapped, perfectly laid out killing zone inside the church. The hostages face death. Flynn faces his own demons, in an electrifying duel of nerves, honor and betrayal...

Full Dark, No Stars


Stephen King - 2010
    For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness. In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself. "Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment. When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It's a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitely ends a good marriage. Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.(front flap)Contains:1922Big DriverA Fair ExtensionA Good Marriage

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I


Arthur Conan Doyle - 1927
    In four novels and fifty-six short stories, Holmes with his trusted friend Dr. Watson, steps from his comfortable quarters at 221B Baker Street into the swirling fog of London. Combining detailed observation with brilliant deduction, Holmes rescues the innocent, confounds the guilty, and solves the most perplexing puzzles crime has to offer.Volume I of The Complete Sherlock Holmes begins with Holmes's first appearance, A Study in Scarlet, a chilling murder novel complete with bloodstained walls and cryptic clues. This is followed by the baffling The Sign of Four, which introduces Holmes's cocaine problem and Watson's future wife. Volume I also includes the story collections The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and concludes with the tale "The Final Problem," in which Conan Doyle, tired of writing Holmes stories, kills off his famed sleuth.(back cover)

Haiti Noir


Edwidge DanticatMarie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel - 2010
    Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.Featuring brand-new stories by: Edwidge Danticat, Rodney Saint-Éloi, Madison Smartt Bell, Gary Victor, M.J. Fievre, Marvin Victor, Yanick Lahens, Louis-Philipe Dalembert, Kettly Mars, Marie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel, Evelyne Trouillot, Katia Ulysse, Ibi Aanu Zoboi, Nadine Pinede, and others.Haiti has a tragic history and continues to be one of the most destitute places on the planet, especially in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Here, however, Danticat reveals that even while the subject matter remains dark, the caliber of Haitian writing is of the highest order.

Fire in the Hole


Elmore Leonard - 2001
    In Leonard's first original e-book, U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (featured in Pronto and Riding the Rap) returns to the Eastern Kentucky coal-mining country of his youth. When Boyd Crowder, a mail-order-ordained minister who doesn't believe in paying his income taxes, decides to blow up the IRS building in Cincinnati, Givens is asked by the local marshal to intervene. This sets up an inevitable confrontation between two men on opposite sides of the law who still have a lingering respect for each other. Throw into the mix Boyd's sister-in-law, Ava, who carries a torch for Raylan along with a deer rifle, and you've got a funny, adrenaline-charged novella only Leonard could have written.

Baltimore Noir


Laura LippmanTim Cockey - 2006
    She attended public schools and has lived in several of the city’s distinctive neighborhoods, including Dickeyville, Tuscany-Canterbury, Evergreen, and South Federal Hill.CONTENTSIntroductionPart I: The Way Things Used To Be“Easy As A-B-C” by Laura Lippman (Locust Point)“Fat Chance” by Robert Ward (Old Northwood)“Pigtown Will Shine Tonight” by Jack Bludis (Pigtown)“Over My Dead Body” by Rob Hiaasen (Fell’s Point)“The Invisible Man” by Rafael Alvarez (Highlandtown)Part II: The Way Things Are“Stainless Steel” by David Simon (Sandtown-Winchester)“Home Movies” by Marcia Talley (Little Italy)“Liminal” by Joseph Wallace (Security Boulevard-Woodlawn)“Almost Missed It By a Hair” by Lisa Respers (France Howard Park)“Ode to the O’s” by Charlie Stella (Memorial Stadium)“Don¹t Walk in Front of Me” by Sarah Weinman (Pikesville)Part III: The Way Things Never Were“As Seen on TV” by Dan Fesperman (Fells Point)“The Haunting of Slink Ridgely” by Tim Cockey (Greenspring Valley)“The Homecoming” by Jim Fusilli (Camden Yards)“Frog Cycle” by Ben Neihart (Inner Harbor)“Goodwood Gardens” by Sujata Massey (Roland Park)

The Continental Op


Dashiell Hammett - 1930
    The Continental Op was his great first contribution to the genre and these seven stories, which first appeared in the magazine Black Mask, are the best examples of Hammett's early writing, in which his formidable literary and moral imagination is already operating at full strength. The Continental Op is the dispassionate fat man working for the Continental Detective Agency, modelled on the Pinkerton Agency, whose only interest is in doing his job in a world of violence, passion, desperate action and great excitement.The tenth clew.--The golden horseshoe.--The house in Turk Street.--The girl with the silver eyes.--The whosis kid.--The main death.--The farewell murder.

Kingston Noir


Colin ChannerIan Thomson - 2012
    Joining award-winning Jamaican authors such as Marlon James, Leone Ross, and Thomas Glave are two "special guest" writers with no Jamaican lineage: Nigerian-born Chris Abani and British writer Ian Thomson. The menacing tone that runs through some of these stories is counterbalanced by the clever humor in others, such as Kei Miller's �White Gyal with a Camera,” who softens even the hardest of August Town’s gangsters; and Mr. Brown, the private investigator in Kwame Dawes’s story, who explains why his girth works to his advantage: "In Jamaica a woman like a big man. She can see he is prosperous, and that he can be in charge." Together, the outstanding tales in Kingston Noir comprise the best volume of short fiction ever to arise from the literary wellspring that is Jamaica.

Twin Cities Noir


Julie SchaperMary Logue - 2006
    Erickson, William Kent Krueger, Ellen Hart, Brad Zeller, Mary Sharratt, Pete Hautman, Larry Millett, Quinton Skinner, Gary Bush, and Chris Everheart.Julie Schaper has been a Twin Cities resident for 11 years. She lives with her husband and two dogs in the Merriam Park neighborhood of St. Paul. Steven Horwitz has worked in publishing for 25 years. He lives with his wife and two dogs in St. Paul.

Miami Noir


Les StandifordJeffrey Wehr - 2006
    Hall, Barbara Parker, John Dufresne, Paul Levine, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Tom Corcoran, Christine Kling, George Tucker, Kevin Allen, Anthony Dale Gagliano, David Beaty, Vicki Hendricks, John Bond, Preston Allen, Lynne Barrett, and Jeffrey Wehr. From the introduction by Les Standiford: The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced . . . We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island's heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the 20th century. This is where the new arrivals debark these days, and it is no mistake that during the last decade of the last century, commentators as diverse as Joan Didion, David Rieff, and T.D. Allman devoted entire volumes to Miami's role as the harbinger for America's future . . . But for now, the novel of crime and punishment is the perfect vehicle to convey the spirit and the timbre of this brawling place to a wider world.CONTENTS Ride along / James W. Hall --Dead storage / Christine Kling --Silence of the stone age / George Tucker --Sawyers / Kevin Allen --Blown away / Anthony Dale Gagliano --One man's ceiling / Tom Corcoran --Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor / Paul Levine --The last of Lord Jitters / David Beaty --The timing of unfelt smiles / John Dufresne --Boozanne, lemme be / Vicki Hendricks --The recipe / Carolina Garcia-Aguilera --T-bird / John Bond --Swap out / Preston Allen --The noir boudoir / Lynne Barrett --Machete / Barbara Parker --The swimmers / Jeffrey Wehr.

Detroit Noir


E.J. Olsen - 2007
    Estleman, Craig Holden, P.J. Parrish, Desiree Cooper, Nisi Shawl, M.L. Liebler, Craig Bernier, Joe Boland, Megan Abbott, Dorene O’Brien, Lolita Hernandez, Peter Markus, Roger K. Johnson, Michael Zadoorian, and E.J. Olsen.