Worse still, the press seem to have it in for him – his every move is headline news. When he discovers that the killer has killed before – that each murder is a homage to a classic crime novel – the fourth estate are quick to coin a nickname… The Novelist…With both men in the public eye, the case develops into a personal duel, each hell-bent on outsmarting the other. There can only be one winner – whoever has the least to lose…

    He buys his suits in Beverly Hills and wins his cases in court. But one day he's approached by a friend to handle the split with his wife. That's the day things start to go very wrong for Andrew Chamberlain . . . up to and including murder."James Scott Bell is at his best in One More Lie. Fast paced, this novella will leave you breathless to the unforeseen end. Once I started reading, I couldn't put it down. Novel Rocket and I give it our highest recommendation. It's a must read!"Ane Mulligan, V. P./Sr. EditorNovel RocketPLUS, three stories full of the suspense twists James Scott Bell is known for:"A Great Man" - The Reverend Mike Rickland was not expecting one of New Jersey's most notorious mobsters to pay him a visit. All Angelo Scapelli wanted was to offer Mike's church ten million dollars. On one condition."Some Hero" - Garth Himmelfarb, middle aged and paunchy, was only trying to work off a few pounds by jogging in his neighborhood. He didn't expect to help a woman in distress, a beautiful woman, a woman he could be a hero for. He didn't expect to step in to a situation that could get him beaten up or killed. But he did."How to Make Living as a Freelance Writer" - A struggling author, once popular, now on the way out, comes up with a last attempt to make enough money to live on as a writer . . . . and actually finds it. Let's just say it's not the "traditional" route."James Scott Bell is a master storyteller. In a few short words he can make you care about a character, cause you to wave your hands in warning as they speed toward disaster, or root for them to win the day." - Susan May Warren, bestselling authorJames Scott Bell is the #1 bestselling author of Plot & Structure (Writer's Digest Books) and numerous novels and stories of suspense. Among these are Watch Your Back and Try Dying. Writing as K. Bennett he is also the author of the zombie legal thriller Pay Me in Flesh.

    His conventional life knocked off the rails, Gerfaut turns the tables and sets out to track down his pursuers. Along the way, he learns a thing or two about himself. . . . Manchette—masterful stylist, ironist, and social critic—limns the cramped lives of professionals in a neoconservative world."Manchette has appropriated and subverted the classic thriller [with] descriptions of undiluted action, violence and suspense [and] a perspective on evil, a disenchanted world of manipulation and fury . . . ." —Times Literary Supplement"The petty exigencies of the classic thriller find themselves summarily reduced to cremains by the fiery blue jets of Jean-Patrick Manchette's concision, intelligence, tension, and style." —Jim Nisbet, author of Lethal Injection and Prelude to a Scream"Manchette is a must for the reading lists of all noir fans. . . . Manchette deserves a higher profile among noir fans." —Publishers Weekly"Manchette . . . performs miracles within this simple story. His style is very matter of fact, stark and almost cool like the jazz his hero or anti-hero Gerfaut devours at every opportunity. Yet in this short novel there is no lack of atmosphere, excitement, characters or descriptive writing, it is just the total lack of unnecessary material that makes the story seem so lean and mean." —Norman Price, EuroCrime"A social satire cum suspense equally interested in dissecting everyday banalities and manufacturing thrills. Writing with economy, deadpan irony, and an eye for the devastating detail, Manchette spins pulp fiction into literature." —Kirkus Reviews"While there isn’t much that’s obviously moral—in the good-versus-evil sense—[this novel] demonstrate[s] why Manchette is hailed as the man who kicked the French crime novel or “polar” out of the apolitical torpor into which it had fallen by the time he started publishing his “neo-polars” in the 1970s. . . . Grim and cerebral as they feel, it’s remarkable how comic—in an absurdist, laugh-or-you’ll-cry way—these books are, as if Manchette had decided that poking fun at the products of the capitalist system were the fittest way to attack the system itself." —Jennifer Howard, Boston Review"The pace is fast, the action sequences are superb, and the effect is just as striking as it must have been when the book was first published in 1976." —Laura Wilson, The Guardian"[T]he novel is brilliantly written, replete with allusions to art, literature, and music, papered with the very texture and furniture of our lives. Manchette is Camus on overdrive, at one and the same time white-hot, ice-cold. He deserves much the same attention." —James Sallis, Review of Contemporary FictionJean-Patrick Manchette (1942—1995) rescued the French crime novel from the grip of stodgy police procedurals — restoring the noir edge by virtue of his post-1968 leftism. Today, Manchette is a totem to the generation of French mystery writers who came in his wake. Jazz saxophonist, political activist, and screen writer, Manchette was influenced as much by Guy Debord as by Gustave Flaubert. City Lights has published more of work, including The Gunman.

    But he was once known - from North Carolina to the beaches of Florida - as the best getaway driver on the East Coast. Just like his father, who disappeared many years ago.After a series of financial calamities (worsened by the racial prejudices of the small town he lives in) Bug reluctantly takes part in a daring diamond heist to solve his money troubles - and to go straight once and for all. However, when it goes horrifically wrong, he's sucked into a grimy underworld which threatens everything, and everyone, he holds dear . . .

    The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia—and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia—driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches—into a region of total madness.

    It’s a private ticket into a secret world of desire and sex and the raw edge between them . . . I read it with the fever of the addicted.”—Michael Connelly“I never miss a book by Vicki Hendricks. No one on the current scene is writing super-charged, erotic, real noir novels like these.”—George P. PelecanosRenata is young, beautiful, and has sex for money and kicks. Few are immune to her intoxicating allure—even her pet Burmese python, Pepe, seems captive to her charm. Richard is one of her clients, a poetry professor with a wife and two sons, whose erotic fascination with Rennie is threatening his home and job.Meanwhile, Julie, a shy wannabe novelist, spies on Rennie from her room next door in between bouts of frustrated writing. Both would do anything to save Rennie from her dangerous occupation and become her one true love.Set in Miami’s gaudy vacationland and the haunting atmosphere of the Everglades, Cruel Poetry is a gripping story of fatal attraction that captures the Florida behind the postcards. As the lives of Richard and Julie unravel amidst drugs and murder, Hendricks amps the adrenaline jolts and sweeps us to a bittersweet climax.Vicki Hendricks lives in Hollywood, Florida, where she teaches English and creative writing. A fan of dangerous sports, she has completed 550 skydives, learned to dog sled in Finland, and has been birding in the jungles of Costa Rica.

    No one has heard from him. He’s disconnected from his friends, from his family, and from the job he dedicated his life to—the job that cost him everything.Then a new, all too familiar murder occurs on his patch and Kidd has no choice but to throw himself back into the fold. A young woman has been found with a smile cut into her throat, eyes carved into her cheeks, the brutal signature of The Grinning Murders—one of the most ruthless serial killers the country has ever seen. A killer who lies behind bars.However things are not as they seem and not everything adds up. Only one thing is clear: Kidd may be the only one who can figure this out before this copycat killer strikes again.

    He's living in Coyote Crossing, working as a part-time deputy. When he gets a call about a dead body in the center of town, he pins his tin star to his Weezer T-shirt, slips into a pair of sweatpants, and grabs his revolver. Victor Gischler is the author of five novels, including Gun Monkeys, Shotgun Opera, and Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse.

    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.

    Now, the war is over but victory's wine has soured and Brodie's back in Scotland to try and save childhood friend Hugh Donovan from the gallows. Everyone thought Donovan was dead, shot down in the war. Perhaps it would have been kinder if he had been killed. The man who returned was unrecognizable: mutilated, horribly burned. Donovan keeps his own company, only venturing out for heroin to deaden the pain of his wounds. When a local boy is found raped and murdered, there is only one suspect...Donovan claims he's innocent but a mountain of evidence says otherwise. Despite the hideousness of the crime, ex-policeman Brodie feels compelled to try and help his one-time friend. Working with Donovan's advocate Samantha Campbell, Brodie trawls both the mean streets of the Gorbals and the green hills of western Scotland in their search for the truth. What they find is an unholy alliance of church, police and Glasgow's deadliest razor gang, happy to slaughter to protect their dark secrets. As time runs out for the condemned man, and the tally of murdered innocents rises, Brodie reverts to his wartime role as a trained killer. It's them or him.

     On a Saturday night in April, Ron Galloway's friends have all arrived at his Ontario lakeside vacation lodge for a boys' weekend without their wives. But as the night wears on and the host himself doesn't arrive, the party turns sour. Then Ron Galloway's suspicious wife, convinced he is having an affair and trying to track him down, arrives on the scene, followed by the police. It is clear something is very wrong.In the hours and days that follow Ron Galloway's disappearance, the secret of an ugly infidelity comes to light, tearing apart Galloway's circle of friends and destroying two marriages. Did Ron Galloway commit suicide to escape his own unforgivable betrayals? What sinister set of circumstances brought him to his desperate end, and how will his survivors cope with the truth without tearing one another apart?

    Fresh out of prison, Foley hooks up with Dawn Navarro, the common-law wife of Foley's extremely wealthy friend, Cundo Rey, in a plan to relieve Cundo of his fortune. What's "trust" among friends when money is involved?

    Sughrue, a Montana investigator who kills time by working at a topless bar. Hired to track down a derelict author, he ends up on the trail of a girl missing in Haight-Ashbury for a decade. The tense hunt becomes obsessive as Sughrue takes a haunting journey through the underbelly of America's sleaziest nightmares.

    One night in 1987, Wieder was brutally murdered in his home and the case was never solved.Peter Katz is hell-bent on getting to the bottom of what happened that night twenty-five years ago and is convinced the full manuscript will reveal who committed the violent crime. But other people’s recollections are dangerous weapons to play with, and this might be one memory that is best kept buried.

    He's escaped from a mental hospital up north and hitchhiked his way south, the voice of his dead brother urging him on. But when Charlie hits Memphis, the fine line between his delusions and reality shift in the form of the Reverend Phineas Childe-a preacher bent on booze and women; a Man of God with a dark agenda. Charlie is the perfect pawn in the Reverend's game of retribution. And the small North Mississippi town of Cuba Landing will be the setting for the Reverend's very personal Apocalypse. . . .