Book picks similar to
Laredo Down by Thom Young
crime
male-author
noir
short-stories
Piggyback
Tom Pitts - 2012
When two young girls disappear with a trunk-load of pot, unaware that their payload has been packed with an extra five kilos of cocaine, a lovable loser persuades a sociopathic killer to pursue them across Northern California in a violent, twisted goose-chase that ends in a horrific place none of them could have forseen.
Siege Mentality
Christopher Brookmyre - 2017
Those trapped inside the castle are used to dealing with the volatile mix of light-fingered teens and obnoxious tourists; less so a truckload of explosives and a hidden agenda. For Catherine and her team, it's a recipe for a potentially deadly day off.
Tense, twisted and laugh-out-loud funny,
Siege Mentality
is a day-trip you won't forget.
For more from Catherine McLeod, read the Jasmine Sharp trilogy, beginning with
Where the Bodies are Buried
, a sample from which is included with this short story.
Blood Underground: A Blood Detective Short Story
Dan Waddell - 2017
A body entombed in a London tube station. DCI Grant Foster is called in to investigate, but within days a second corpse is discovered in the bowels of a disused underground ‘ghost’ station. With the possibility of the murders being linked, Foster enlists the help of his friend, genealogist Nigel Barnes. Between them, they try to untangle the twisted secrets of the past, buried deep beneath London’s streets – where no one can hear you scream, and the murderer is closing in on his next victim . Includes an extract from The Blood Detective, the first book in the Blood Detective series.
Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled
David CranmerAmy Grech - 2011
This collection includes thirteen lean and mean stories from the fingertips of Garnett Elliott, Glenn Gray, John Hornor Jacobs, Patricia Abbott, Thomas Pluck, Brad Green, Ron Earl Phillips, Kent Gowran, Amy Grech, Benoit Lelievre, Kieran Shea, David Cranmer, and Wayne D. Dundee and a boiled down look at hardboiled fiction in an introduction by Ron Scheer. Edited by David Cranmer and Scott D. Parker.
The Trespassers (Kindle Single)
Elmore Leonard - 2013
Told from the perspective of a young wife who’s become increasingly frustrated with her mild-mannered husband, “The Trespassers” begins as a quiet domestic drama and quickly escalates into a nightmare. When Evan refuses to confront men who are illegally hunting on the couple’s remote homestead, Chris takes matters into her own hands, with terrifying results. Written in 1958, when Leonard was working at a Detroit advertising agency and writing short stories on the side, “The Trespassers” shows the emerging talent of a man whose spare style and dark wit would redefine a literary genre. Filled with as much sexual menace as Sam Peckinpah’s classic thriller “Straw Dogs,” this timelessly relevant story delivers a sly surprise that could only come from the mind of Elmore Leonard. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elmore Leonard wrote forty-five novels across his six-decade career, including the bestsellers “Road Dogs,” “Up in Honey’s Room,” “The Hot Kid,” “Mr. Paradise,” “Tishomingo Blues,” and the critically acclaimed collection of short stories “When the Women Come Out to Dance.” Many of his books have been made into movies, including “Get Shorty,” “Out of Sight,” and “Jackie Brown.” “Justified,” the hit series from FX, is based on Leonard’s character Raylan Givens, who appears in “Riding the Rap,” “Pronto,” the short story “Fire in the Hole,” and the novel “Raylan.” Leonard received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA, and the Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America. He was known to many as the “Dickens of Detroit” and had lived in the Detroit area since 1934. PRAISE FOR ELMORE LEONARD “Elmore Leonard can write circles around almost anybody active in the crime novel today.” —The New York Times Book Review “There is no greater writer of crime fiction than Elmore Leonard, and no one who has more resplendent energy.” —The Guardian (UK) “Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard is more than just one of the all-time greats of crime fiction. He’s … an authentic American icon.” —The Seattle Times “People look on writers that they like as an irreplaceable resource. I do. Elmore Leonard, every day I wake up and—not to be morbid or anything, although morbid is my life to a degree—don’t see his obituary in the paper, I think to myself, ‘Great! He’s probably working somewhere. He’s gonna produce another book, and I’ll have another book to read.’ Because when he’s gone, there’s nobody else.” — Stephen King “The King Daddy of crime novelists.” —The Seattle Times “As crime fiction goes, Leonard has few living equals. His characters leap from the page with a few short keystrokes, like a form of bloodstained haiku.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer “[Leonard’s] finely honed sentences can sound as flinty/poetic as Hemingway or as hard-boiled as Raymond Chandler. His ear for the way people talk—or should—is peerless.” —The Detroit News “A master of narrative … A poet of the vernacular … Leonard paints an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the
Key West Normal (Bric Wahl Series book 3): The Whole Ball of Whacks (The Bric Wahl Series)
Wayne Gales - 2016
After a faked drowning and new names, courtesy of the Witness Protection Program, they can travel all over the world and live the life of the rich and famous, but all they really want to do is go home. They know as long as they stay far from Key West they will be safe.Or will they? This third novel in the “Bric Wahl” series takes Bric and Karen on an amazing voyage, first by motor home across the US and then on a sixty one foot sailing yacht, visiting ports in the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean and Pacific Ocean before they set sail for Key West. They feel safe traveling under their new identities and enjoy their surroundings, believing the people who want to harm them are far away.Or are they?Resigned to leaving Key West forever, they both wonder if all the wealth is worth the loss. After all, the only thing they really wanted was a slice of Key West Normal, and now they have to hide for the rest of their lives.Or do they?Bric and Karen hatch a plan that will let them sneak back to the keys under disguise, but after they return, Bric discovers some disturbing activities in Key West. He takes action, knowing that it may very well end his relationship with the love of his life.
Stay Out of the Woods: Strange Encounters, Volume 3
Tom Lyons - 2021
The Betrayed
Kate Kray - 2010
But their married life was far from what she had hoped it would be and was marred by drug abuse and violence. After Johnny was arrested and sentenced to 18 years, it became clear that their relationship was doomed to fail. Now, years later, and for the first time in a long time, life is finally looking up for Rosie Mullins. She has confronted her jealous husband and told him that she wants out, her acting career has taken off, and she has fallen into a new relationship with a top TV executive. All too quickly, however, she finds that Johnny’s influence extends far beyond the prison walls that contain him. To make matters worse, his intensely loyal twin brother, "Mad Dog" Eddie, is proving to be every bit as dangerous as her husband. Betrayed by those who had sworn to protect her and cornered by her past, Rosie has to fight with every breath to protect herself and her beloved daughter, Ruby. She finds herself forced to play a very, very dangerous game; setting her old family against her new one.
Corsican Gold: An Archaeological Thriller (A Darwin Lacroix Adventure)
Dave Bartell - 2021
Death Served Cold
Sourabh Mukherjee - 2021
A teenager poisons her family for the love of her tutor. A woman driven by greed ruthlessly bludgeons eight members of her family.A beautician gangs up with her lover to rob a house, killing innocent women from three generations of a family. A practising lawyer strangles her lawyer husband with the cord of a mobile charger. A friendly and jovial teacher commits at least six murders over fourteen years in a sleepy town down south.DEATH SERVED COLD is a painstakingly researched collection of true, blood-curdling accounts of gruesome murders committed by India’s most dangerous women over the last three decades.These stories explore the dark recesses of the female psyche and challenge popular stereotypes by revealing shocking excesses of sadism and aggression rarely associated with women.
The Sister
R.J. Ellory - 2008
Ellory's electrifying ebook-exclusive trilogy, THREE DAYS IN CHICAGOLAND. The testimonies of the sister, the cop and the killer will at last reveal the dreadful truth behind the brutal murder of a young girl in Chicago in 1956. That final minute should have lasted forever, but it was gone before I knew it.Four years, five months, fifteen days, and twenty-two hours collapsed into sixty seconds.Today I will see a man die. Today I will see justice delivered. Four and a half years ago a man - a monster - put his hands around my sister's fragile neck and squeezed the life out of her. He confessed without hesitation. He gave no explanation, no defense, and he did not ask for mercy. And as I sit here, counting down his final seconds on this Earth, I know my wait is over. I will finally get what I truly desire: to see my sister's killer executed in front of my eyes.
In The Shadow Of The Hill
Helen Forbes - 2014
Detective Sergeant Joe Galbraith starts what seems like one more depressing investigation of the untimely death of a poor unfortunate who was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. As the investigation spreads across Scotland it reaches into a past that Joe has tried to forget, and takes him back to the Hebridean island of Harris, where he spent his childhood. Among the mountains and the stunning landscape of religiously conservative Harris, in the shadow of Ceapabhal, long buried events and a tragic story are slowly uncovered, and the investigation takes on an altogether more sinister aspect. In The Shadow Of The Hill skilfully captures the intricacies and malevolence of the underbelly of Highland and Island life, bringing tragedy and vengeance to the magical beauty of the Outer Hebrides.
Tussinland
Mike Monson - 2014
His inertia is broken when he becomes the chief suspect in the murders of his soon-to-be ex-wife and her new lover. Set in the town of Modesto, deep in California’s Central Valley, Tussinland is about sex, drugs, addiction, smart phones, Facebook and the internet, digital cable, anti-government militias, reality TV, fundamentalist homophobic Christians, families, 12-step groups, pornography, marriage, death, disease, and love.