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.

Snow Angels


James Thompson - 2010
    Kaamos: Just before Christmas, the darkest time of the year in Lapland, above the Arctic Circle. The unrelenting darkness and extreme cold cause everyone to go just a little bit insane, whether or not they’ve just killed someone… A beautiful Somalian refugee-turned-actress is found murdered on a reindeer farm, gruesomely mutilated, a racial slur carved into her chest. Inspector Kari Vaara, head of the rural police force, is under great pressure not only to solve this crime himself, without the help of the big-city cops from Helsinki, but also to keep the potentially explosive case out of the news. Sufia Elmi had become a tabloid fixture, and her death—not to mention the awful way she met it—is sure to send shock waves across this insular, secretly racist country. Was this murder a hate crime, a sex crime—or both?Kari is dealing with culture shock at home, too. His wife, Kate, is a young American woman, newly pregnant with their first child. She doesn’t understand much about Finnish customs or the Finns themselves and is struggling to come to terms with her new home. Kari himself is haunted by his rough childhood and his past, and even as he tries to shape a new life with Kate, the past keeps biting at his heels: the rich man his ex-wife left him for years ago may be Sufia’s killer.

The Business of Dying


Simon Kernick - 2002
    Cynical and jaded, Milne earns money on the side by doing what he does best: punishing the bad guys. But this time he's been duped. Instead of blowing away drug dealers, he kills three innocent people, their deaths starting an investigation that sees him and his conscience heading for trouble.Less than twelve hours later, Milne is out on the streets again. Eighteen-year-old Miriam Fox has been found dead by Regent's Canal---her throat slashed. Desperate to find Miriam's killer, Milne uncovers a web of depravity far more shocking than he could ever have imagined. Can he evade arrest for his own crimes and solve a case so sickening that it may provide the key to his personal redemption?The clock is ticking and everyone's watching their backs as a war of morality is fought in the mind of one renegade policeman in this gripping first novel by a talented young crime writer.

Darktown


Thomas Mullen - 2016
    The newly minted policemen are met with deep hostility by their white peers and their authority is limited: They can’t arrest white suspects; they can’t drive a squad car; they can’t even use the police headquarters and must instead operate out of the basement of a gym.When a black woman who was last seen in a car driven by a white man turns up fatally beaten, no one seems to care except for Boggs and Smith, two black cops from vastly different backgrounds. Pressured from all sides, they will risk their jobs, the trust the community has put in them, and even their own safety to investigate her death. Their efforts bring them up against an old-school cop, Dunlow, who has long run the neighborhood like his own, and Dunlow’s young partner, Rakestraw, a young progressive who may or may not be willing to make allies across color lines.

Generation Loss


Elizabeth Hand - 2007
    Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.

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.

The Crow Girl


Erik Axl Sund - 2016
    When two more bodies are found, it becomes clear that she is hunting a serial killer.With her career on the line, she turns to psychotherapist Sofia Zetterlund. Together, they uncover a chain of shocking events that began decades ago – but will it lead them to the murderer before someone else dies?

Big Red Tequila


Rick Riordan - 1997
    Ten years ago Navarre lefttown and the memory of his father's murder behind him. Now he's back, looking for answers. Yet the more Tres digs, trying to put his suspicions to rest, the fresher the decade-old crime looks: Mafia connections, construction site payoffs, and slick politicians' games all conspire to ruin his homecoming. It's obvious Tres has stirred up a hornet's nest of trouble. He gets attacked, shot at, run over by a big blue Thunderbird--and his old girlfriend, the one he wants back, turns up missing. Tres has to rescue the woman, nail his father's murderer, and get the hell out of Dodge before mob-style Texas justice catches up to him. The chances of staying alive looked better for the defenders of the Alamo...."A standout...A crooked construction company, corrupt cops, oldenemies--you can almost feel the summer storms rolling over South Texas." "---Publishers Weekly (starred review)"

Slammer


Allan Guthrie - 2009
    The problem is, there's no right crowd. Bullied and abused by inmates and colleagues alike, Glass finds that each day is getting longer than the one before. When a group of cons use outside help to threaten his wife and daughter, he agrees to do them a 'favor'. But, as their threats escalate, and one favor leads to another, he grows ever closer to breaking point. And when Glass breaks, he shatters...Slammer is a mile-a-minute thriller shot through with Guthrie's unique blend of dark humor and ultra-violent mayhem. His previous books have been lauded as "gripping noir" (Entertainment Weekly) and "character driven and exciting" (Cleveland Plain Dealer).

Now We Are Dead


Stuart MacBride - 2017
    Now he’s back on the streets and women are being attacked again. Wallace has to be responsible, but if Detective Sergeant Steel goes anywhere near him, his lawyers will get her thrown off the force for good.The Powers That Be won’t listen to her, not after what happened last time. According to them, she’s got more than enough ongoing cases to keep her busy. Perhaps she could try solving a few instead of harassing an innocent man?Steel knows Wallace is guilty. And the longer he gets away with it, the more women will suffer. The question is: how much is she willing to sacrifice to stop him?

A Place of Execution


Val McDermid - 1999
    On a freezing day in December, another child goes missing: 13-year-old Alison Carter vanishes from the isolated Derbyshire hamlet of Scardale. For the young George Bennett it is the beginning of his most difficult and harrowing case: a murder with no body, an investigation with more dead ends and closed faces than he'd have found in the inner city; an outcome that reverberates down the years.Decades later he tells his story to journalist Catherine Heathcote, but just when her book is poised for publication, Bennett tries to pull the plug. He has new information that he will not divulge, and that threatens the very foundation of his existence. Catherine is forced to reinvestigate the past, with results that turn the world upside down.A taut psychological thriller that explores, exposes and explodes the border between reality and illusion in a multilayered narrative that turns expectations on their head and reminds us that what we know is what we do not know...

Wormwood (Rob Soliz and Frank Pierce, #1)


Larry Enmon - 2017
    As the mayor's daughter, her kidnapping triggers mounting political pressure and forces the Chief of Police to put two senior detectives on the case. Rob Soliz and Frank Pierce have done the impossible in the past, but their methods are unconventional.The only evidence at the scene is a Bible found in the girl's car and soon Frank and Rob find themselves involved in a disturbing investigation shrouded by Bible prophecy, doomsday cults, and murder.Is Katrina still alive? And what exactly is Wormwood?As the trail leads them into the woods of rural East Texas, Frank must deal with his lingering religious doubts and solve the case. His worst fears will be realised when he must discover the ugly truth about Wormwood. But he and Rob will have to get out alive to tell the story…

A Perfect Evil


Alex Kava - 2000
    . .The brutal murders of three young boys paralyze the citizens of Platte City, Nebraska. What's worse is the grim realization that the man recently executed for the crimes was a copycat. When Sheriff Nick Morrelli is called to the scene of another grisly murder, it becomes clear that the real predator is still at large, waiting to kill again.Morreli understands the urgency of the case terrorizing his community, but it's the experienced eye of FBI criminal profiler Maggie O'Dell that pinpoints the true nature of the evil behind the killings -- a revelation made all the more horrific when Morrelli's own nephew goes missing.Maggie understands something else: the killer is enjoying himself, relishing his ability to stay one step ahead of her, making this case more personal by the hour. Because out there, watching, is a killer with a heart of pure and perfect evil.

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime


Leif G.W. Persson - 2002
    It seems to be a mundane suicide—at least that’s what the police choose to think. But the young man is American, not Swedish, and there are a couple of odd things about his room when they search it. . . . From these tiny beginnings, Leif GW Persson slowly begins to unravel a puzzle that gets larger and larger as it becomes more and more complex, until it sweeps us into a web of international espionage, backroom politics, greed, sheer incompetence, and the shoddy work of Sweden’s intelligence force that leads to the murder of the prime minister. The first novel in a dark and dazzling trilogy that has become the defining fictional account of the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme—an event that triggered the biggest criminal investigation in recorded history—Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is a riveting insider’s combination of black satire, thriller, psychological drama, and police procedural by a writer universally acknowledged as Sweden’s leading criminologist.

The Hundredth Man


Jack Kerley - 2004
    They're also launching Detective Carson Ryder into a nightmare with only one weapon-his own terrifying past.