Somebody Owes Me Money


Donald E. Westlake - 1969
    But what he got was a tip on a horse race. Which might have turned out okay, except that when he went to collect his winnings, Chet found his bookie lying dead on the living room floor. Chet knows he had nothing to do with it-but just try explaining that to the cops, to the two rival criminal gangs who each think Chet's working for the other, and to the dead man's beautiful sister, who has flown in from Las Vegas to avenge her brother's murder...

The Sins of the Fathers


Lawrence Block - 1976
    Her alleged murderer—a minister's son—hanged himself in his jail cell. The case is closed. But the dead girl's father has come to Matthew Scudder for answers, sending the unlicensed private investigator in search of terrible truths about a life that was lived and lost in a sordid world of perversion and pleasures.

Nightmare Alley


William Lindsay Gresham - 1946
    Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?


Horace McCoy - 1935
    The marathon dance craze flourished during the 1930s, but the underside was a competition and violence unknown to most ballrooms—a dark side that Horace McCoy's classic American novel powerfully captures."Were it not in its physical details so carefully documented, it would be lurid beyond itself." —Nation

Drive


James Sallis - 2005
    Sallis combines murder, treachery and payback in a sinister plot with resonances of 1940s pulp fiction and film noir. Told through a cinematic narrative that weaves back and forth through time and place, the story explores Driver's near existential moral foundations, intercut with moments of bloody violence.

Cop Hater


Ed McBain - 1956
    But when his partner becomes victim number two, it looks like open-and-shut grudge killings. That is, until a third detective buys it.ED MCBAIN'S FIRST 87th PRECINCT NOVEL

Endless Night


Agatha Christie - 1967
    There, amongst the dark fir trees, he planned to build a house, find a girl and live happily ever after. Yet, as he left the village, a shadow of menace hung over the land. For this was the place where accidents happened. Perhaps Michael should have heeded the locals’ warnings: ‘There’s no luck for them as meddles with Gipsy’s Acre.’ Michael Rogers is a man who is about to learn the true meaning of the old saying ‘In my end is my beginning.’The title Endless Night was taken from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence and describes Christie’s favourite theme in the novel: a “twisted” character, who always chooses evil over good.Christie finished Endless Night in six weeks, as opposed to the three-four months that most of her other novels took. Despite being in her seventies while writing it, she told an interviewer that being Michael, the twenty-something narrator, “wasn’t difficult. After all, you hear people like him talking all the time.”The book is dedicated to Christie's relative "Nora Prichard from whom I first heard the legend of Gipsy's Acre." Gipsy's Acre was a field on the Welsh moors.

A Touch of Death


Charles Williams - 1953
    Original.

The Bride Wore Black


Cornell Woolrich - 1940
    All they really knew about her was that she possessed a terrifying beauty-and that each time she appeared, a man died horribly...

I Married a Dead Man


William Irish - 1948
    In the crowded train car she meets happy newlyweds Patrice Hazzard, also expecting, and Hugh. They are on their way to visit Hugh’s parents, whom Patrice is meeting for the first time. After Patrice hands Helen her wedding band so she can wash her hands in the rest room, the train crashes, killing the Hazzards, but Helen survives. When she regains consciousness in the hospital, she discovers she has been mistaken for Patrice. Patrice’s wealthy in-laws send for Helen, and she decides for the sake of her son to go along with the misunderstanding. They welcome her into the fold and her “brother-in-law” Bill even shows signs of romantic interest. But when her husband tracks her down and threatens her with blackmail, her dream turns into a nightmare.

Night Walker


Donald Hamilton - 1954
    David Young is a lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve, returning to active duty. On his way to Norfolk Naval Base in the middle of the night, Young hitches a ride with Lawrence Wilson, an ill-tempered man who explains how he was recently fired from the Navy Department for alleged seditious activities. Young is suddenly attacked by the stranger and loses consciousness. When he awakens, he is laying in a hospital bed with his head wrapped in bandages. The nurse calls him "Mr. Wilson" and informs him that he is lucky to be alive after such a horrific car accident. Things get even stranger when his supposed wife -- a brunette bombshell named Elizabeth -- checks the still-sedated Young out of the hospital and takes him home. Without even realizing it, Young becomes the main target of a killer -- or killers -- involved in an intricate Communist plot that threatens the security of the nation. It's a testament to Hamilton's narrative brilliance that Night Walker is just as wildly compelling today as it was when it was originally released in 1954. This timeless pulp classic has it all: down-and-dirty fall guys, sexy damsels in distress, sadistic villains, elaborate conspiracies -- an absolute must-read for any and all discerning connoisseurs of mystery. Paul Goat AllenCover art for Dell First Edition 27 by Carl Bobertz

The Neon Rain


James Lee Burke - 1987
    Lost without his wife's love, Robicheaux's haunted soul mirrors the intensity and dusky mystery of New Orleans' French Quarter -- the place he calls home, and the place that nearly destroys him when he becomes involved in the case of a young prostitute whose body is found in a bayou. Thrust into the world of drug lords and arms smugglers, Robicheaux must face down a subterranean criminal world and come to terms with his own bruised heart in order to survive.

Mr. Mercedes


Stephen King - 2014
    They are tired and cold and desperate. Emerging from the fog, invisible until it is too late, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes.Months later, an ex-cop named bill Hodges, still haunted by the unsolved crime, contemplates suicide. When he gets a crazed letter from "the perk," claiming credit for the murders, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, fearing another even more diabolical attack and hell-bent on preventing it.Brady Hartfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again. Only Bill Hodges, with a couple of eccentric and mismatched allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again. And they have no time to lose, because Brady's next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim thousands.Mr. Mercedes is a war between good and evil from the master of suspense whose insight into the mind of this obsessed, insane killer is chilling and unforgettable.--front flap

The Return of the Dancing Master


Henning Mankell - 2000
    Stefan Lindman, a young police officer recently diagnosed with mouth cancer, decides to investigate the murder of his former colleague, but is soon enmeshed in a mystifying case with no witnesses and no apparent motives. Terrified of the disease that could take his life, Lindman becomes more and more reckless as he unearths the chilling links between Molin’s death and an underground neo-Nazi network that runs further and deeper than he could ever have imagined.

Little Girl Lost


Richard Aleas - 2004
    So how did she wind up shot to death on the roof of New York s seediest strip club? It s up to detective John Blake to uncover his ex-girlfriend s secret life as a striptease queen. But the deeper he digs, the darker the secrets he uncovers, until a shattering face-off in an East Village tenement changes his life forever. First time in paperback--a stunning debut novel from an author whose stories have been selected for BEST MYSTERY STORIES OF THE YEAR and THE YEAR S BEST HORROR STORIES, as well as short-listed for the Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America.