New Orleans has always had a heart of noir.Brand-new stories by: Thomas Adcock, Ace Atkins, Patty Friedmann, David Fulmer, Barbara Hambly, Greg Herren, Laura Lippman, Tim McLoughlin, James Nolan, Ted O'Brien, Eric Overmyer, Jeri Cain Rossi, Maureen Tan, Jervey Tervalon, Olympia Vernon, Christine Wiltz, Kalamu Ya Salaam, and Julie Smith, who also edited the collection.

    This is not an anthology of ill-conceived and inauthentic political thrillers. Instead, in D.C. Noir, pimps, whores, gangsters, and con-men run rampant in zones of this city that most never hear about.

    In the face of his impending institutionalization, he continually reinvents himself to escape the legal and mental health authorities and to save himself from a life of incarceration. But running turns out to be costly. Vincent's clients in the L.A. underworld lose patience, the hospital evaluator may not be fooled by his story, and the only person in as much danger as himself is the woman who knows his real name.

    She tries to keep up with her studies, her friends, and her hot-tempered roommate, Ellie, who regularly courts trouble with the law.When a male student’s remains are found in alligator-infested waters, the university warns students to stay away from the reptiles. But then a second body shows up, and the link is undeniable. Both men belonged to the same fraternity and had a reputation for preying on and hurting women.Ellie has previously threatened to kill men who don’t take no for an answer. Rebecca and her friends thought Ellie was kidding. But now a vigilante killer is roaming campus—someone who knows how to dispose of rapists. Someone determined to save female students from horrible crimes.With each passing day, those who know Ellie become more convinced she’s responsible. But if she is, stopping her might not be in everyone’s best interest…

    It’s the perfect getaway to unplug—and to calm an uneasy marriage. But on Adam’s first day out on the water, he sees Sophie abducted by a stranger. A hundred yards from shore, Adam can’t save her. And Sophie disappears.In a nearby cabin is another couple, Kristen and Connor Moss. Unfortunately, beyond what they’ve heard in the news, they’re in the dark when it comes to Sophie’s disappearance. For Adam, at least there’s comfort in knowing that Mason County detective Lee Husemann is an old friend of his. She’ll do everything she can to help. She must.But as Adam’s paranoia about his missing wife escalates, Lee puts together the pieces of a puzzle. The lives of the two couples are converging in unpredictable ways, and the picture is unsettling. Lee suspects that not everyone is telling the truth about what they know—or they have yet to reveal all the lies they’ve hidden from the strangers they married.

    A devastating accusation. Who should she trust, her husband or her best friend?It was supposed to be the perfect reunion: six university friends together again after twenty years. Host Ali finally has the life she always wanted, a career she can be proud of and a wonderful family with her college boyfriend, now husband. But that night her best friend makes an accusation so shocking that nothing will ever be the same again.When Karen staggers in from the garden, bleeding and traumatised, she claims that she has been assaulted—by Ali’s husband, Mike. Ali must make a split-second decision: who should she believe? Her horrified husband, or her best friend? With Mike offering a very different version of events, Ali knows one of them is lying—but which? And why?When the ensuing chaos forces her to re-examine the golden era the group shared at university, Ali realises there are darker memories too. Memories that have lain dormant for decades. Memories someone would kill to protect.

    The kind we've all told - to a former acquaintance we can't quite place but still, for some reason, feel the need to impress. The story of our life, embellished for the benefit of the happily married lawyer with the kids and the lovely home.And the next thing you know, you're having dinner at their house, and accepting an invitation to join them on holiday - swept up in their perfect life, the kind you always dreamed of...Which turns out to be less than perfect. But by the time you're trapped and sweating in the relentless Greek sun, burning to escape the tension all around you - by the time you start to realise that, however painful the truth might be, it's the lies that cause the real damage...... well, by then, it could just be too late. Longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Crime Novel of the Year

    Each tale in this anthology edited by Ann Hood is set in a different part of the city. Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout's story takes place at Trinity Repertory Company. Thomas Cobb, whose novel Crazy Heart was made into a movie with Jeff Bridges, tees up at Triggs Memorial Golf Course, and Dumb and Dumber co-writer and co-director Peter Farrelly, a graduate of Providence College, sets his story in the Elmhurst neighborhood, near his old college stomping grounds."-- Boston Globe "Providence, of course, has a history of crime, the mob, corruption and other goodies. In this collection of 15 stories...we are given a darkly hued tour of the city in all its nooks and crannies by such excellent writers as Hood herself, John Searles, Bruce DeSilva, Peter Farrelly, Elizabeth Strout, Hester Kaplan and others, each with their own style, tone and sly approach that will keep you reading, waiting for the sudden murder, the end of troubled relationships, the discovery of bones....[A] wonderful collection."-- Providence Journal Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.Featuring brand-new stories by: John Searles, Elizabeth Strout, Taylor M. Polites, Hester Kaplan, Robert Leuci, Amity Gaige, Peter Farrelly, Pablo Rodriguez, Bruce DeSilva, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Luanne Rice, Dawn Raffel, Thomas Cobb, LaShonda Katrice Barnett, and Ann Hood.Anyone who has spent time in Providence, Rhode Island, knows that lurking in the shadows are many sinister noir elements and characters. The city is ripe for this volume, and Akashic is proud to have recruited the amazing Ann Hood as editor. The impressive contributor list conveys the caliber of Providence Noir, which joins Cape Cod Noir, Boston Noir, and Boston Noir 2: The Classics in sketching a dark and alternative portrait of these New England locales.From the introduction by Ann Hood:"Providence was founded in 1636 by a rogue named Roger Williams. Williams escaped here when Massachusetts was ready to deport him back to England. In the almost four hundred years since, we've become infamous for all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors, including serving as home base for the Patriarca crime family for decades. My very own Uncle Eddie--I can hear Mama Rose screaming at me: 'He wasn't a blood relative! He was related through marriage!'--was gunned down in the Silver Lake section of town in 1964, just a year after he drove me in his white Cadillac convertible in a parade as the newly crowned Little Miss Natick. The writer Geoffrey Wolff told me that once he went to a barber in Princeton, New Jersey and the barber asked him where he was from. 'Providence,' Wolff told him. The barber put down his scissors, raised his hands in the air, and said, 'Providence? Don't shoot!'"I've asked fourteen of my favorite writers to contribute short stories to Providence Noir. We have stories to make you shiver, stories to make you think, stories that will show you my beautiful, noirish city in a way it’s never been highlighted before."

    Ostracised by her colleagues, her family and her partner, she begins to wonder if she really is losing her mind.And then she meets the next victim.So compulsive you can't stop reading.So chilling you won't stop talking about it.A pitch-black and devastatingly original psychological thriller.

    Then a terrifying reality sets in: her daughter is missing.Days earlier, Estelle discovered her baby’s crib empty in their Brooklyn apartment. There was no sign of a break-in, but all traces of seven-month-old Mia had disappeared. Her diapers, her clothes, her bottles—all gone. Frustrated and unable to explain her daughter’s disappearance, Estelle begins a desperate search. But when the lack of evidence casts doubt on her story, Estelle becomes the number one suspect in the eyes of the police and the media.As hope of reuniting with Mia becomes all she has left, Estelle will do anything to find answers: What has she done to her baby? And what has someone else done to her?

    Her body was discovered days later, her beautiful face bashed in with a rock. Police determine her brutal death to be a mugging gone wrong and drop the matter into their cold case files.Over a year later, Tracy’s sister, Sondra, still can’t come to grips with what happened. She throws herself into her work as a documentary filmmaker to try and forget the cruelty of her sister’s death. However, a chance encounter with a man from Tracy’s past rips the wound open and sends Sondra on a desperate search for answers about the secrets from her sister’s life that may have led to her death.As Sondra struggles to uncover what happened to Tracy, she’s launched into a tangled web of deceit and danger that put her on a collision course with life and death…

    Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the geographic area of the book. Grady and Graff, both Montana natives, masterfully curate this collection of hard-edged Western tales.From the introduction by James Grady and Keir Graff: This anthology is a road trip through the dreams and disasters of the true Montana, stories written by authors with Montana in their blood, tales that circle you around the state through its cities and small towns. These are twenty-first century authors writing timeless sagas of choice, crime, and consequences...You'll meet students and strippers, cops and cons, druggies and dreamers, cold-eyed killers and caught-in-their-gunsights screwed-up souls. But mostly, through all our fiction here, you'll meet quiet heroes and see the noir side of life that makes our Montana as real as it is mythic. No doubt the state's beauty will still make the very idea of Montana Noir seem incongruous to some. Noir is black-and-white. Streets and alleys. Flashing neon lighting a rain-streaked window. But while noir was definitely an urban invention, it knows no boundaries. Noir is struggle. It's doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. It's being trapped. It's hubris. It's being defeated yet going on. Sometimes it's being defeated and not going on.That's life everywhere. This is our Montana.

    . .All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop.He is "the King of Manhattan North," a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of "Da Force." Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest, an elite special unit given carte blanche to fight gangs, drugs, and guns. Every day and every night for the eighteen years he’s spent on the Job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps. He’s done whatever it takes to serve and protect in a city built by ambition and corruption, where no one is clean—including Malone himself.What only a few know is that Denny Malone is dirty: he and his partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash in the wake of the biggest heroin bust in the city’s history. Now Malone is caught in a trap and being squeezed by the Feds, and he must walk the thin line between betraying his brothers and partners, the Job, his family, and the woman he loves, trying to survive, body and soul, while the city teeters on the brink of a racial conflagration that could destroy them all.This is the great cop novel of our time and a book only Don Winslow could write: a haunting story of greed and violence, inequality and race, crime and injustice, retribution and redemption that reveals the seemingly insurmountable tensions between the police and the diverse citizens they serve. A searing portrait of a city on the edge and of a courageous, heroic, and deeply flawed man who stands at the edge of its abyss, The Force is a masterpiece of urban realism full of shocking and surprising twists, leavened by flashes of dark humor, a morally complex and utterly riveting dissection of modern American society and the controversial issues confronting us today.

    At least, it feels that way until a serial killer starts dicing up women from the shelter where she volunteers. Despite the ever-present tingling at the nape of her neck, Hannah manages to convince herself that the killings have nothing to do with her brutal past—until her boyfriend is murdered in the same ruthless manner as the others. It doesn’t help that the police think she might have done it. But the cops are right about one thing: Hannah is responsible. Because she knows who the killer is. Now she must face the fact that she brought a monster with her to Ash Park—and his appetite for blood is insatiable. Everyone's hungry for something. Some are more famished than others.

    She's happier than she's ever been but her life is a lie. Jane Hughes does not really exist.Five years earlier Jane and her then best friends went on holiday but what should have been the trip of a lifetime rapidly descended into a nightmare that claimed the lives of two of the women.Jane has tried to put her past behind her but someone knows the truth about what happened. Someone who won't stop until they've destroyed Jane and everything she loves.