Book picks similar to
Pale Horses by Nate Southard


crime
noir
police-procedural
rural-noir

City On Fire: Five LAPD Thrillers


Dallas Barnes - 2020
    He silently hopes his life choices aren’t a reflection of what he sees wrong in others.Detective Bobbi Marshal is an attractive woman whose beauty turns heads. Ironically, she and her partner comprise the LAPD Wilshire Division sex team. Bobbi, mature, sophisticated, capable and compassionate, finds herself working and competing in a man’s world.Detective Sergeant Stryker and Detective West are a “Salt & Pepper” team, one white, one Black. Besides race, there’s one crucial difference between the men…at End of Watch, Stryker drives out of the ghetto into a White community where he lives. West has a much shorter drive, his home is in the ghetto.Now, it’s just a matter of time and cunning …and who makes the first fatal mistake. City on Fire includes: City of Passion, Badge of Honor, Deadly Justice, See the Woman and Yesterday Is Dead.

Every Dead Thing


John Connolly - 1999
    Tortured by the unsolved slayings of his wife and young daughter, he is a man consumed by guilt, regret, and the desire for revenge. When his former partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker finds himself drawn into a world beyond his imagining: a world where thirty-year-old killings remain shrouded in fear and lies, a world where the ghosts of the dead torment the living, a world haunted by the murderer responsible for the deaths in his family—a serial killer who uses the human body to create works of art and takes faces as his prize. But the search awakens buried instincts in Parker: instincts for survival, for compassion, for love, and, ultimately, for killing.Aided by a beautiful young psychologist and a pair of bickering career criminals, Parker becomes the bait in a trap set in the humid bayous of Louisiana, a trap that threatens the lives of everyone in its reach. Driven by visions of the dead and the voice of an old black psychic who met a terrible end, Parker must seek a final, brutal confrontation with a murderer who has moved beyond all notions of humanity, who has set out to create a hell on earth: the serial killer known only as the Traveling Man.In the tradition of classic American detective fiction, Every Dead Thing is a tense, richly plotted thriller, filled with memorable characters and gripping action. It is also a profoundly moving novel, concerned with the nature of loyalty, love, and forgiveness. Lyrical and terrifying, it is an ambitious debut, triumphantly realized.

Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories


Frank Bill - 2011
    Frank Bill delivers what is both a wake-up call and a gut punch. Welcome to heartland America circa right about now, when the union jobs and family farms that kept the white on the picket fences have given way to meth labs, backwoods gunrunners, and bare-knuckle brawling.Bill's people are pressed to the brink--and beyond. There is Scoot McCutchen, whose beloved wife falls terminally ill, leaving him with nothing to live for--which doesn't quite explain why he brutally murders her and her doctor and flees, or why, after years of running, he decides to turn himself in. In the title story, a man who has devolved from breeding hounds for hunting to training them for dog-fighting crosses paths with a Salvadoran gangbanger tasked with taking over the rural drug trade, but who mostly wants to grow old in peace. As Crimes in Sourthern Indiana unfolds, we witness the unspeakable, yet are compelled to find sympathy for the depraved.Bill's southern Indiana is haunted with the deep, authentic sense of place that recalls the best of Southern fiction, but the interconnected stories bristle with the urban energy of a Chuck Palahniuk or a latter-day Nelson Algren and rush with the slam-bang plotting of pulp-noir crime writing a la Jim Thompson. Bill's prose is gritty yet literary, shocking, and impossible to put down. A dark evocation of the survivalist spirit of the working class, this is a brilliant debut by an important new voice.

The Man on Hackpen Hill


J.S. Monroe - 2021
    Amazing' Rosamund LuptonAn original, intelligent and twisty thriller set in rural Wiltshire. A dead body in a crop circle sends a coded message. Can DI Silas Hart uncover the chilling truth before it's too late?It isn't unusual for crop circles to appear overnight on Hackpen Hill. In this part of Wiltshire, where golden wheat fields stretch for miles, the locals have got used to discovering strange mathematical patterns stamped into the earth.But this time, it's different. Not only because this particular design of dramatic spiralling hexagons has never been seen before. But because of the dead body positioned precisely in the centre of the circle. DI Silas Hart, of Swindon Police, is at a loss.Only Jim, a scientist at secretive government laboratory Porton Down, knows the chilling truth about the man on Hackpen Hill. And he wants Bella, a trainee journalist on her first ever story, to tell the world. But Silas has other ideas – and a boss intent on a cover up.As Bella and Jim race against time, dark forces conspire against them, leading them to confront the reality of their own past and a world in which nothing is as it seems.

The Girl in the Basement


Wayne Simmons - 2014
    Her captor is insane, his intentions unclear.Now, facing the demons from her past could be the only way to ensure a future…The Girl in the Basement is a fast-paced thriller from the bestselling author of Flu and Plastic Jesus.'Jaw-clenchingly brutal and bitterly unrelenting from start to finish.' —DLS Reviews'...shocking and brilliant...' —Bookbloke‘A stunning read, but not for the faint hearted.' —The Guardian on Plastic Jesus‘With The Girl in the Basement, Simmons gives classic pulp writers a taste of their own plaid.’ —Sion Smith, Skin Deep Tattoo Magazine‘Breathless and unrelenting, you cannot fail to turn the page and see what happens next.’ —JD Gillam, Starburst Magazine‘A short, sharp shock to the system. Simmons grabs you from the first line of the first page and doesn’t let go. You’ll be as trapped as the Girl in the Basement herself: unable to escape or even to stop reading. Highly recommended.’ —David Moody, author of Autumn, Hater and The Cost of Living

Short Shockers: Collection One


Peter James - 2013
    Funny, sad, but always shocking, each tale carries a twist that will haunt readers for days after they turn the final page . . .This 25,000 word collection, available exclusively in this ebook edition, includes:12 Bolingbroke Avenue (First published in 1998)Number Thirteen (First published in 2010)Just Two Clicks (First published in 2004)Dead on the Hour (First published in 2006)Virtually Alive (First published in 1997)Meet Me at the Crematorium (First published in 2009)Venice Aphrodisiac (First published in 2011)Time Rich (First published in 2013)Christmas is for the Kids (First published in 1993)

Sunset and Sawdust


Joe R. Lansdale - 2003
    To Camp Rapture’s general consternation, Sunset’s mother-in-law arranges for her to take over from Pete as town constable. As if that weren’t hard enough to swallow in depression era east Texas, Sunset actually takes the job seriously, and her investigation into a brutal double murder pulls her into a maelstrom of greed, corruption, and unspeakable malice. It is a case that will require a well of inner strength she never knew she had. Spirited and electrifying, Sunset and Sawdust is a mystery and a tale like nothing you’ve read before.

Irène


Pierre Lemaitre - 2006
    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…

Old Anger (Colt Harper Book 2)


Phillip Thompson - 2020
    Sheriff Colt Harper believes he's colorblind in his enforcement of the law. But is he? When a black man is murdered, it ignites age-old anger in the African-American community over the injustices they've endured and forces Harper to confront his own personal demons. Harper's single-minded pursuit of justice for the dead man thrusts him between two volatile groups -- furious blacks who don't know if they can trust him and racist whites who want to use the controversy to spark a bloody race war."Old Anger has some sweet echoes of the past while being something modern at the same time. Pacing is outstanding and the story is engaging. It has a western rash under it's skin. Recommended." Joe R. Lansdale""Phillip Thompson combines the visceral verbal skills of Craig Johnson with the white knuckle tension of Stephen Hunter. Old Anger will leave you soaked in sweat and gasping for air" S.A. Cosby author of Blacktop Wasteland."Old Anger is a modern Southern novel in the best sense-exploring issues of race, privilege, and generational mistrust with candor and grace. It's also a fiercely engaging mystery. Thompson's lawman, Colt Harper, is a man of honor in a world that could use more of 'em. Consider me a fan." Chris Holm, Anthony Award winning author of The Killing Kind"In Thompson's well-wrought third crime novel featuring Mississippi sheriff Colt Harper. Thoughtful prose is matched by solid characterizations. Thompson delivers a timely tale of racial violence." Publishers Weekly

Cold Quiet Country


Clayton Lindemuth - 2012
    A farmer has been stabbed clean through the neck with a pitchfork. Two sets of tracks lead from the barn, and the dead man’s frantic wife exclaims her daughter is missing. Convinced it was Gale G’Wain, the orphan who worked at the farm, Bittersmith follows the vanishing footprints into the storm.Three miles away, Gale G’Wain is alone and close to dead. He’s holed up in an empty farmhouse, half-dressed and nearly dead after falling through lake ice. Innocent, but unlikely to ever stand trial in a town as corrupt as Bittersmith, he loads his gun and prepares to defend himself against the dead man’s bloodthirsty sons and the Sheriff’s Department.Set in small town Wyoming in the 70s and unfolding in a single day, Clayton Lindemuth's debut novel, Cold Quiet Country, explores small-town corruption and the lengths some people will go to exact revenge.

Waste


Andrew F. Sullivan - 2016
    1989. A city on the brink of utter economic collapse. On the brink of violence. Driving home one night, unlikely passengers Jamie Garrison and Moses Moon hit a lion at fifty miles an hour. Both men stumble away from the freak accident unharmed, but neither reports the bizarre incident. Haunted by the dead lion, Moses storms through the frozen city with his pathetic crew of wannabe skinheads searching for his mentally unstable mother. Jamie struggles with raising his young daughter and working a dead-end job in a butcher shop, where a dead body shows up in the waste buckets out back. A warning of something worse to come. Somewhere out there in the dark, a man is still looking for his lion. His name is Astor Crane, and he has never really understood forgiveness.

Birthdays for the Dead


Stuart MacBride - 2012
    A bloody, brilliant and brutal story of murder, kidnap and revenge.Detective Constable Ash Henderson has a dark secret…Five years ago his daughter, Rebecca, went missing on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. A year later the first card arrived: homemade, with a Polaroid picture stuck to the front – Rebecca, strapped to a chair, gagged and terrified. Every year another card: each one worse than the last.The tabloids call him ‘The Birthday Boy’. He’s been snatching girls for twelve years, always just before their thirteenth birthday, sending the families his homemade cards showing their daughters being slowly tortured to death.But Ash hasn’t told anyone about Rebecca’s birthday cards – they all think she’s just run away from home – because if anyone finds out, he’ll be taken off the investigation. And he’s sacrificed too much to give up before his daughter’s killer gets what he deserves…

Nowhere


Roger Smith - 2016
    A dark tale of fate, revenge and violence in a country where wrong is the new right.When the president of South Africa murders his wife in a fit of drunken rage he charges his most trusted henchman, the bloodthirsty Steve Bungu, with orchestrating a cover-up that pivots on blackmailing Joe Louw, a retired cop of impeccable ethics, to mount a fake investigation that'll clear the crooked head of state.In a seemingly unconnected case, Investigator Disaster Zondi (Mixed Blood, Dust Devils) who, because of his criticism of the corrupt post-apartheid regime, has been banished to the fringes of law enforcement, is given the thankless task of traveling to the remote Kalahari Desert to arrest Magnus Kruger, a notorious white supremacist who rules over an Afrikaner-only enclave, for the slaying of a young black man.As Louw and Zondi peel away layers of lies, hatred and festering secrets they reveal the connections that bind them, connections that reach back deep into the nightmare of South Africa's apartheid past.

Small Crimes


Dave Zeltserman - 2008
    Nobody wants Joe to hang around, not his ex-wife, his parents or his former colleagues. Meanwhile, local mafia don Manny Vassey is dying of cancer and keen to cut a deal with God. He’s thinking of singing to the DA if this will set him up for a better afterlife. And he knows stuff that will send Joe down again for a very long time.Set in the pressure cooker of a very small town, Small Crimes is an explosive thriller that brings the claustrophobic hell of Jim Thompson and James M. Cain right up to date.

Stalked in the Woods


Stephen Young - 2016
    and that's when your heart starts pounding.… Creepy Encounters in the Woods, Horrifying true stories of people being stalked in the woods, by ‘something' undefined... Creepy camping stories that will make you never want to go camping again, True cabin in the woods stories, ....Unexplained Mysteries in the woods that defy explanation, Paranormal and Ghost stories, Cryptids, Bigfoot....or....something else. True Stories that make you check your doors are bolted. Alone in the Woods, the sound of branches snapping, the fleeting dark shadow that appears to be coming closer to you.... the dark lonely woods suddenly don't feel so empty…. Do you love Creepy stories?...In these True stories that's exactly what you'll get….There’s something in the woods…..And it’s coming for you…. Stephen (Steph) Young has appeared on national radio shows and podcasts including Coast to Coast AM, The Unexplained, Where did the road go?, and Midnight in the Desert... An independent Researcher addicted to researching all Paranormal, Supernatural, Esoteric & Enigmatic mysteries. Each book Young writes seems to lead to further questions and searches for answers as the mysteries inevitably deepen & develop into ever more complex riddles in the spectrum of the Unknown.