Ratlines


Stuart Neville - 2013
    As the Irish people prepare to welcome President John F. Kennedy to the land of his ancestors, a German national is murdered in a seaside guesthouse. Lieutenant Albert Ryan, Directorate of Intelligence, is ordered to investigate. The German is the third foreigner to die within a few days, and Minister for Justice Charles Haughey wants the killing to end lest a shameful secret be exposed: the dead men were all Nazis granted asylum by the Irish government in the years following World War II.A note from the killers is found on the dead German's corpse, addressed to Colonel Otto Skorzeny, Hitler's favorite commando, once called the most dangerous man in Europe. The note simply says: "We are coming for you."As Albert Ryan digs deeper into the case he discovers a network of former Nazis and collaborators, all presided over by Skorzeny from his country estate outside Dublin. When Ryan closes in on the killers, his loyalty is torn between country and conscience. Why must he protect the very people he fought against twenty years before? Ryan learns that Skorzeny might be a dangerous ally, but he is a deadly enemy.

Galveston


Nic Pizzolatto - 2010
    On the same day that Roy Cady is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he senses that his boss, a dangerous loan-sharking bar-owner, wants him dead. Known “without affection” to members of the boss’s crew as “Big Country” on account of his long hair, beard, and cowboy boots, Roy is alert to the possibility that a routine assignment could be a deathtrap. Which it is. Yet what the would-be killers do to Roy Cady is not the same as what he does to them, which is to say that after a smoking spasm of violence, they are mostly dead and he is mostly alive.Before Roy makes his getaway, he realizes there are two women in the apartment, one of them still breathing, and he sees something in her frightened, defiant eyes that causes a fateful decision. He takes her with him as he goes on the run from New Orleans to Galveston, Texas—an action as ill-advised as it is inescapable. The girl’s name is Rocky, and she is too young, too tough, too sexy—and far too much trouble. Roy, Rocky, and her sister hide in the battered seascape of Galveston’s country-western bars and fleabag hotels, a world of treacherous drifters, pickup trucks, and ashed-out hopes. Any chance that they will find safety there is soon lost. Rocky is a girl with quite a story to tell, one that will pursue and damage Roy for a very long time to come in this powerful and atmospheric thriller, impossible to put down. Constructed with maximum tension and haunting aftereffect, written in darkly beautiful prose, Galveston announces the arrival of a major new literary talent.

Dogs of God


Pinckney Benedict - 1993
    A tale of malevolence and violence, this "stunning novel" (New York Times Book Review) is the story of Tannhauser, a crazed backswoodsman turned drug lord, and the idiosyncratic characters who are enticed into his destructive orbit.

Low Down Death Right Easy


J. David Osborne - 2013
    Imagine a Raymond Carver or Jim Thompson for the text message age and that would only begin to get it."-Kris Saknussemm, author of Reverend America Trapped in a rural Oklahoma town fueled by meth and doused in codeine, Arlo Clancy has made it his life's goal to keep his troubled younger brother, Sepp, out of prison. Poverty and the lure of easy drug money were pressure enough, before a gruesome discovery beneath the waters of their favorite fishing hole sent their lives into a tailspin. Torn by cowardice and conscience, the brothers make a fateful decision which will bring them ever-closer to Danny Ames-a vicious enforcer for the local meth trade-and a nightmare world where their only chance of escape might be... LOW DOWN DEATH RIGHT EASY "Working class fiction at its best."-Benjamin Whitmer, author of Pike "A gritty tapestry of subversive drama the likes of which I'd compare to Harmony Korine's Gummo packed in with the terse lines of Bukowski."-Michael J. Seidlinger, author of My Pet Serial Killer

Hell at the Breech


Tom Franklin - 2003
    His outraged friends -- —mostly poor cotton farmers -- form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham war are four people: the aging sheriff sympathetic to both sides; the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech; a ruthless detective who wages his own war against the gang; and a young store clerk who harbors a terrible secret. Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the events of dark days that led the people involved to discover their capacity for good, evil, or for both.

The Marauders


Tom Cooper - 2015
    For the oddballs and lowlifes who inhabit the sleepy, working class bayou town of Jeannette,  these desperate circumstances serve as the catalyst that pushes them to enact whatever risky schemes they can dream up to reverse their fortunes. At the center of it all is Gus Lindquist, a pill-addicted, one armed treasure hunter obsessed with finding the lost treasure of pirate Jean Lafitte. His quest brings him into contact with a wide array of memorable characters, ranging from a couple of small time criminal potheads prone to hysterical banter, to the smooth-talking Oil company middleman out to bamboozle his own mother, to some drug smuggling psychopath twins, to a young man estranged from his father since his mother died in Hurricane Katrina. As the story progresses, these characters find themselves on a collision course with each other, and as the tension and action ramp up, it becomes clear that not all of them will survive these events.

Once Were Cops


Ken Bruen - 2008
    He's also a sociopath who walks a knife edge between sanity and all-out mayhem. When an exchange program is initiated and twenty Guards come to America and twenty cops from the States go to Ireland, Shay, as he's known, has his lifelong dream come true--he becomes a member of the NYPD. But Shay's dream is about to become New York's nightmare.Paired with an unstable cop nicknamed Kebar for his liberal use of a short, lethal metal stick called a K-bar, the two unlikely partners become a devastatingly effective force in the war against crime.But Kebar harbors a dangerous secret: he's sold out to the mob to help his sister. Her rape and beating leaves her in a coma and pushes an already unstable Kebar over the edge just as Shea's dark secrets threaten boil over and into the streets of New York.Once Were Cops melds the street poetry of Brooklyn and Dublin into a fast-paced, incomparable hard-boiled novel. This is Ken Bruen at his best.

The Devil All the Time


Donald Ray Pollock - 2011
    There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.

Lake Country


Sean Doolittle - 2012
    His punishment: two days in jail for every year of his probation. But for one friend of the victim’s family—an ex-marine named Darryl Potter—this punishment isn’t enough. Potter sets out to even the score by kidnapping Benson’s twenty-year-old daughter. It’s a bad, bad plan, and only Mike Barlowe, Potter’s former combat buddy, knows how to stop it. With a beautiful news reporter, the cops, and a bounty hunter on Potter’s tail, Barlowe races to head off his troubled friend before innocent people get hurt. The hunters and the hunted plunge north into Minnesota’s Lake Country, each with their own ambitions and demons, each headed for a violent collision—and for one horrifying moment of life or death.“As long as there are writers like Sean Doolittle out there, American crime fiction has got a sterling future ahead of it.”—Dennis Lehane“With  Lake Country,  Sean Doolittle has out- Fargo ed  Fargo . Already a master of Midwestern noir, he takes a huge, novelistic leap with his newest work, a complex, quirky, and tremendously satisfying story of revenge and redemption. If you haven’t yet read a Doolittle novel, you’ve missed the cutting edge of crime fiction today. Trust me, this guy is the future.”—William Kent Krueger,  New York Times  bestselling author of  Northwest Angle

Nineteen Seventy Four


David Peace - 1999
    Crime correspondent for the Evening Post. He didn't know it was going to be a season in hell. A dead little girl with a swan's wings stitched to her back. A gypsy camp in a ring of fire. Corruption everywhere you look.In Nineteen Seventy Four, David Peace brings passion and stylistic bravado to this terrifyingly intense journey into a secret history of sexual obsession, greed and sadism.

Redemption Road


John Hart - 2016
    The first and only author to win back-to-back Edgars for Best Novel. Every book a New York Times bestseller. After five years, John Hart is back. Since his debut bestseller, The King of Lies, reviewers across the country have heaped praise on John Hart, comparing his writing to that of Pat Conroy, Cormac McCarthy and Scott Turow. Each novel has taken Hart higher on the New York Times Bestseller list as his masterful writing and assured evocation of place have won readers around the world and earned history's only consecutive Edgar Awards for Best Novel with Down River and The Last Child. Now, Hart delivers his most powerful story yet. Imagine: A boy with a gun waits for the man who killed his mother. A troubled detective confronts her past in the aftermath of a brutal shooting. After thirteen years in prison, a good cop walks free as deep in the forest, on the altar of an abandoned church, a body cools in pale linen… This is a town on the brink. This is Redemption Road.Brimming with tension, secrets, and betrayal, Redemption Road proves again that John Hart is a master of the literary thriller.

Kiss Me, Judas


Will Christopher Baer - 1998
    Red dress, black hair, body like a knife. He takes her back to his room and wakes the next morning in a bathtub full of blood and ice, missing a kidney.Dragging himself from a hospital bed, Phineas discovers he wants to be with Jude like a hunger -- and he wants to find her and kill her. Falling for her is the start of a twisted love story that takes him from the snowy streets of Denver to the high plains of Texas where the boundaries between torturer and victim, killer and accomplice, become nightmarishly distorted.

A Shelter of Others


Charles Dodd White - 2014
    As Mason and Lavada set forth to recover themselves, they remain entrenched in the rural and rugged landscape that bore them and their haunted histories. This moving story tells of the families we’re borne into, the families we make for ourselves, and how tightly woven are the ties that bind.“Charles Dodd White’s writing is dark, gothic and steeped in a voice that is all his own. A Shelter of Others confronts what it means to be human.” Frank Bill, author of Donnybrook“It would be easy to draw comparisons to Harry Crews, Ron Rash, or James Salter, but to do so would overlook a voice uniquely his own. Charles Dodd White whittles language down to its most beautiful form. His prose has been pared to poetry. Simple as that.” David Joy, author of Where All Light Tends To Go

A Free Man of Color


Barbara Hambly - 1997
    In the midst of Mardi Gras, Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher, is playing piano at the Salle d'Orleans when the evenings festivities are interrupted--by murder.Ravishing Angelique Crozat, a notorious octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, has been strangled to death. With the authorities reluctant to become involved, Ben begins his own inquiry, which will take him through the seamy haunts of riverboatmen and into the huts of voodoo-worshipping slaves.But soon the eyes of suspicion turn toward Ben—for, black as the slave who fathered him, this free man of color is still the perfect scapegoat....

The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter


Malcolm Mackay - 2013
    The telephone rings; a casual conversation, but behind this a job offer. The clues are there if you know to look for them. He is an expert. A loner. Freelance. Another job is another job, but what if this organization wants more?A meeting at a club. An offer. A target: Lewis Winter, a necessary sacrifice that will be only the first step in an all-out war between crime syndicates the likes of which hasn't been seen for decades. It's easy to kill a man. It's hard to kill a man well. People who do it well know this. People who do it badly find out the hard way. The hard way has consequences.