The Dawn Patrol


Don Winslow - 2008
    The author of The Winter of Frankie Machine is back with a razor-sharp novel as cool as its California surfer heroes, and as heart-stopping as a wave none of them sees coming.

House Dick (Hard Case Crime #54)


E. Howard Hunt - 1961
    hotel (no, not that hotel) investigating a twisty tale of burglary and murder, of skullduggery under cover of darkness, of deception and shifting loyalties – and of the price you pay when you trust the wrong people…

Suicide Squeeze


Victor Gischler - 2004
    The high spot of Teddy Folger's life was the day in 1954 that he got an autographed baseball card from Joe DiMaggio himself. It's been downhill ever since. Which is why he just unloaded his freeloading wife and torched his own comic-book store–in one of the stupidest insurance scams in history. Enter Conner Samson. The down-on-his-luck repo man has just been hired to repossess Teddy's boat. Little does he know there's a baseball card on board that some men are willing to kill for. Thus begins a rip-roaring cross-country odyssey–and with bodies piling up, the squeeze is on for the penultimate piece of Americana. And Conner will be lucky if he ends up back where he started: broke and (still) breathing.From the Hardcover edition.

March Violets


Philip Kerr - 1989
    Bernhard Gunther, a hard-boiled Berlin detective who specializes in tracking down missing persons — mostly Jews. He is summoned by a wealthy industrialist to find the murderer of his daughter and son-in-law, killed during the robbery of a priceless diamond necklace. Gunther quickly is catapulted into a major political scandal involving Hitler's two main henchmen, Goering and Himmler. The search for clues takes Gunther to morgues overflowing with Nazi victims; raucous nightclubs; the Olympic games where Jesse Owens tramples the theory of Aryan racial superiority; the boudoir of a famous actress; and finally to the Dachau concentration camp. Fights with Gestapo agents, shoot-outs with adulterers, run-ins with a variety of criminals, and dead bodies in unexpected places keep readers guessing to the very end. Hard-hitting, fast-paced, and richly detailed, March Violets is noir writing at its blackest and best.

Easy Death


Daniel Boyd - 2014
    ...and two robbers hired by a local crime boss manage to heist half a million dollars from an armored car. But getting the money and getting away with it are two different things, especially with a blizzard coming down, the cops in hot pursuit, and a double-crossing gambler and a murderous park ranger threatening to turn this white Christmas blood red.

Epitaph for a Tramp & Epitaph for a Dead Beat: The Harry Fannin Detective Novels


David Markson - 1959
    Together here in one volume, these works are now available to a new generation of readers.In Epitaph for a Tramp, Fannin isn't called out to investigate a murder — it happens on his doorstop. In the sweltering heat of a New York August night, he answers the buzzer at his door to find his promiscuous ex-wife dying from a knife wound. To find her killer, Fannin plies his trade with classic hard-boiled aplomb. In the second novel, Epitaph for a Dead Beat, Fannin finds himself knee-deep in murder among the beatniks and bohemians of the early 1960s, where blood seems to flow as readily as cheap Chianti.Intricately plotted and rife with wisecracks, David Markson offers suspenseful and literary crime novels.

You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up


Eric Knight - 1938
    When Dick commits one crime and plans another, the police arrest him for a crime he actually did not commit. Dick attempts to reconcile with his family and find his way out of LA’s seedy underworld. You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up was a bestseller when originally published in 1938 and is a noir classic.

The Confession


Domenic Stansberry - 2004
    But he’s also got a mistress.  And when Jake’s mistress is found strangled to death with his necktie, it’s up to him to prove he didn’t do it. But how can he, when all the evidence says he did? Jake races to reveal the secret conspiracy against him.  But with every step, the noose is tightening, and all of Jake’s resourcefulness may not be enough to save him?

The Colorado Kid


Stephen King - 2005
    There's no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues. But that's just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still...? No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world's great storytellers presents a surprising tale that explores the nature of mystery itself...

The Blank Wall


Elisabeth Sanxay Holding - 1947
    This novel is about maternal love and about the heroine's relationship with those around her, especially her children and her maid.

The Posthumous Man


Jake Hinkson - 2012
    Then the ER doctors revived him. It’s infatuation at first sight when he meets his nurse, Felicia Vogan, a strange young woman with a weakness for sad sacks and losers. After she helps Elliot escape from the hospital, she takes him back to her place. He’s happy to go with her, even when she leads him straight to a gang planning a million dollar heist. Does Felicia just want Elliot to protect her from the outfit’s psychotic leader, Stan the Man? Or is Elliot being set up to take the hard fall? One thing’s for sure: if he’s going to survive this long night of deceit and murder, Elliot will have to finally face himself and his own dark past.

The Black-Eyed Blonde


Benjamin Black - 2014
    The telephone on my desk had the look of something that knows it's being watched. Traffic trickled by in the street below, and there were a few pedestrians, too, men in hats going nowhere."So begins The Black-Eyed Blonde, a new novel featuring Philip Marlowe--yes, that Philip Marlowe. Channeling Raymond Chandler, Benjamin Black has brought Marlowe back to life for a new adventure on the mean streets of Bay City, California. It is the early 1950s, Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and business is a little slow. Then a new client is shown in: young, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she wants Marlowe to find her former lover, a man named Nico Peterson. Marlowe sets off on his search, but almost immediately discovers that Peterson's disappearance is merely the first in a series of bewildering events. Soon he is tangling with one of Bay City's richest families and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune.Only Benjamin Black, a modern master of the genre, could write a new Philip Marlowe detective novel that has all the panache and charm of the originals while delivering a story that is as sharp and fresh as today's best crime fiction.

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps


Otto Penzler - 2007
    Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.Including:• Three stories by Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dashiell Hammett.• Complete novels from Carroll John Daly, the man who invented the hard-boiled detective, and Fredrick Nebel, one of the masters of the form.• A never before published Dashiell Hammett story.• Every other major pulp writer of the time, including Paul Cain, Steve Fisher, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and many, many more of whom you’ve probably never heard.• Three deadly sections–The Crimefighters, The Villains, and Dames–with three unstoppable introductions by Harlan Coben, Harlan Ellison, and Laura LippmanFeaturing:• Plenty of reasons for murder, all of them good.• A kid so smart–he’ll die of it.• A soft-hearted loan shark’s legman learning–the hard way–never to buy a strange blonde a hamburger.• The uncanny “Moon Man” and his mad-money victims.

The Two Faces of January


Patricia Highsmith - 1964
    Rydal Keener is waiting for something exciting to happen in his grubby little Athens hotel. At forty-odd, Chester MacFarland has been waiting much longer, expecting his life of stock manipu­lation and fraud to catch up with him. And Colette, Chester's wife, is waiting for something altogether different. After a nasty little incident in the hotel, they all wait together. As the stakes, and the tension, in their three-cornered waiting game mount, they learn that while passports and silence can be bought, other things can cost as much as your life.

The Case of the Velvet Claws


Erle Stanley Gardner - 1933
    Eva's husband George is behind tabloid editor Frank Locke’s blackmail of Congressman Harrison Burke. The politician and Eva had been together at a restaurant when there was an attempted robbery. It's not long before George takes a bullet to the heart as he's getting out of his bath. There's a forged will too. It benefits his nephew Carl, who is engaged to the daughter of Mrs. Veitch, the Belters’ secretive housekeeper. Is this complicated or what!At least Eva Belter had brains; she was smart enough to consult Perry Mason.