In the novella, "The Martini Shot," Pelecanos takes readers behind the scenes of a cable TV cop show, where a writer gets caught up in drama more real than anything in a script. Crackling with energy, these stories bring readers to a new understanding of humanity, modern life, and circumstances that stack the deck against people who are just trying to make a decent life for themselves. Gritty, sexy, fast-paced, humane, THE MARTINI SHOT is Pelecanos at his very best.Whether they're cops or conmen, savage killers or creative types, gangsters or God-fearing citizens, George Pelecanos' characters are always engaged in a fight for their lives. They fight to advance or simply to survive; they fight against odds, against enemies, even against themselves. In this, his first collection of stories, the acclaimed novelist introduces readers to a vivid and eclectic cast of combatants.A seasoned claims investigator tracks a supposedly dead man from Miami to Brazil, only to be thrown off his game by a kid from the local slum. An aging loser takes a last stab at respectability by becoming a police informant. A Greek-American couple adopts an interracial trio of sons and then struggles to keep their family together, giving us a stirring bit of background on one of Pelecanos' most beloved protagonists, Spero Lucas. In the title novella - which takes its name from Hollywood slang for the last shot of the day, the one that comes before the liquor shots begin - we go behind the scenes of a television cop show, where a writer gets caught up in a drama more real than anything he could have conjured for a script.

    It's even more savage inside the twisted minds of murderers who conceal their malevolence behind smiling masks and strike out without pity. This spine-tingling collection contains 23 new stories of suspense from some of the bestselling authors in the genre. Authors include Clive Barker, Lawrence Block, David Morrell, Ray Bradbury, and many more.CONTENTSThe dripping / David Morrell --The wringer / F. Paul Wilson --A season of change / Richard T. Chizmar --Good vibrations / Richard Laymon --The Tulsa experience / Lawrence Block --Trolls / Christopher Fahy --Small deaths / Charles de Lint --White lightning / Al Sarrantonio --Hitman / Rick Hautala --Vympyre / William F. Nolan --And eight rabid pigs / David Gerrold.Bringing it along / A.R. Morlan --Redemption / Jack Ketchum --The graveyard ghoul / Edward D. Hoch --The rings of Cocytus / Katherine Ramsland --Late last night / John Maclay --Beasts in buildings, turning 'round / J.N. Williamson --Dark side of the moon / Babara Collins --Honor bound / J.M. Morgan --The instrumentalist / William Relling Jr. --Corpse carnival / Ray Bradbury --The book of blood / Clive Barker.

    Trying not to miss his girlfriend (away studying in Mexico), the nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort--until strange things begin happening around him.Starting with a series of peculiar phone calls, the writer then finds clumps of seaweed on his doorstep. But as the incidents escalate, his friends fall victim to a series of mysterious "accidents"--some of them fatal. Aided by Elmo Crumley, a savvy, street-smart detective, and a reclusive actress of yesteryear with an intense hunger for life, the wordsmith sets out to find the connection between the bizarre events, and in doing so, uncovers the truth about his own creative abilities.

    Then, out of the blue, her estranged sister, Sharon, shows up after fifteen years, seeking refuge from her life as a Las Vegas stripper. At first Lily is overwhelmed and overjoyed. Her daughter and husband welcome Sharon with open arms, eager to help the seemingly troubled young woman get a fresh start. But that’s not really what Sharon wants. Under the alias Starr Bright, Aunt Sharon is the most wanted female serial killer in the country.   Driven by a need for love and security, she has sought out sex and degradation—leaving behind a bloody trail of carved-up men in cheap motel rooms from coast to coast. Now, she’s insinuating herself into the lives of those who trust and love her. She’s come home to family, and not just to hide. For her entire life, Sharon has been nursing a poisonous vengeance that has yet to claim its last victim. And very, very soon, Starr Bright will strike again.

    The result is a triumph, featuring masterpieces of suspense by:Robert Bloch, Lawrence Block, Anthony Boucher, Frederic Brown, James M. Cain, Max Allan Collins, Jeffery Deaver, Stanley Ellin, Harlan Ellison, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ed Gorman, Patricia Highsmith, Reginald Hill, Tony Hillerman, Evan Hunter, Stephen King, John D. MacDonald ,Ed McBain, Sharyn McCrumb, Ruth Rendell, Sara Paretsky, Georges Simenon, Mickey Spillane, Donald E. Westlake, Robert Barnard, Anna Katharine Green, Jeremiah Healy, John Lutz, Ross MacDonald, Michael Malone, Steve Martini, Margaret Millar, Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini, Ellery Queen, Lisa Scottoline, Rex Stout, Janwillem van de Wetering

    Be it Walter Mosley’s great detective Easy Rawlins, or the mean streets of Harlem at the hands of Chester Himes, the stories and characters in this anthology have shaped the mystery genre with their own unique viewpoints and styles. Contributors to the collection include Robert Greer, Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Cary Phillips, Frankie Bailey, and Richard Wright.

    To earn himself the guise of respectability, he is willing to go as far as murder.

    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.

    But when the frozen body of a young man is discovered several days before a referendum that will decide the future of Greenland, Greenland’s First Minister urges Petra to forgo retirement and investigate the case.As the people of Nuuk lock their doors, and the voting booths are empty, Petra stretches the limited resources of the department and orders more police onto the streets in a desperate hunt for a killer determined to make this Christmas one to remember.Set in Greenland, "The Calendar Man" twists Greenlandic politics, traditions and myths into a dark tale set in the darkest month of the year, in a frighteningly imaginable future. "The Calendar Man" is set many years after the events in the Greenland Crime series, but features several of the characters introduced in those books.Inspired by the Scandinavian and Greenlandic tradition of Christmas Advent Calendars, "The Calendar Man" has 24 parts, one for each day in December, leading up to the conclusion on December 24th, Christmas Eve, when Greenlanders and Scandinavians celebrate Christmas. "The Calendar Man" can also be read as a "regular" book.

    Worlds collide!In an unprecedented collaboration, twenty-three of the world’s bestselling and critically acclaimed thriller writers have paired their series characters—such as Harry Bosch, Jack Reacher, and Lincoln Rhyme—in an eleven-story anthology curated by the International Thriller Writers (ITW). All of the contributors to FaceOff are ITW members and the stories feature these dynamic duos: · Harry Bosch vs. Patrick Kenzie in “Red Eye,” by Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane· John Rebus vs. Roy Grace in “In the Nick of Time,” by Ian Rankin and Peter James· Slappy the Ventriloquist Dummy vs. Aloysius Pendergast in “Gaslighted,” by R.L. Stine, Douglas Preston, and Lincoln Child· Malachai Samuels vs. D.D. Warren in “The Laughing Buddha,” by M.J. Rose and Lisa Gardner· Paul Madriani vs. Alexandra Cooper in “Surfing the Panther,” by Steve Martini and Linda Fairstein· Lincoln Rhyme vs. Lucas Davenport in “Rhymes With Prey,” by Jeffery Deaver and John Sandford· Michael Quinn vs. Repairman Jack in “Infernal Night,” by Heather Graham and F. Paul Wilson· Sean Reilly vs. Glen Garber in “Pit Stop,” by Raymond Khoury and Linwood Barclay· Wyatt Hunt vs. Joe Trona in “Silent Hunt,” by John Lescroart and T. Jefferson Parker· Cotton Malone vs. Gray Pierce in “The Devil’s Bones,” by Steve Berry and James Rollins· Jack Reacher vs. Nick Heller in “Good and Valuable Consideration,” by Lee Child and Joseph Finder So sit back and prepare for a rollicking ride as your favorite characters go head-to-head with some worthy opponents in FaceOff—it’s a thrill-a-minute read.

    If a man is not eager for adventure at the age of twenty-two, the enticement of romantic possibilities will never come to him.

    Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different interests against each other the better, as always, to make a killing. But then something snaps: the master manipulator falls prey to a pure and wayward passion.Aimée has become the avenging angel of her own nihilism, exacting the destruction of a whole society of destroyers. An unholy original, Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the modern detective novel into a weapon of gleeful satire and anarchic fun. In Fatale he mixes equal measures of farce, mayhem, and madness to prepare a rare literary cocktail that packs a devastating punch.

    Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Robert van Gulik, William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett, Edmund Cripn, Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Ray Bradbury, P.D. James, Donald Westlake, and Ed McBain. From Zangwill's 1892 classic The Big Bow Mystery to James's never-before-published “The Murder of Santa Clause,” these detective stories offer every kind of tension, shock and intrigue—a century's worth of excitement.The New York Times has called Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels “the best series of detective novels by an American,” and The Chill is vintage Archer. His investigation of the disappearance of a bride on her honeymoon leads him to a small southern California college and to three related murders spinning two decades and half a continent.In Ruth Rendell's Death Nothes, Inspector Wexford is called upon to investigate the accidental death of a world-famous flutist. As he probes the case, he discovers false identities, odd coincidences, and the certainty that the death was no accident, but a meticulously planned murder.Dashiell Hammett's private eye Sam Spade appears only in The Maltese Falcon—and in three short stories, “A Man Called Spade,” “They Can Only Hang You Once,” and “Too Many Have Lived.” All three are included here—together for the first time in decades.Featuring Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlow, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, and the formidable Ellery Queen, Great Detectives assembles the star sleuths of the last century and a dazzling array of tales—the best by the best.Contents: Foreword / David Willis McCullough — The Big Bow Mystery—Israel Zangwill — The Queen’s Square—Dorothy L. Sayers — The Invisible Man—G. K. Chesterton — The Girl in the Train—Agatha Christie — The Murder on the Lotus Pond—Robert van Gulik — Hand Upon the Waters—William Faulkner— The Sam Spade Stories—Dashiell Hammett— A Man Called Spade—Dashiell Hammett — They Can Only Hang You Once—Dashiell Hammett — Too Many Have Lived—Dashiell Hammett — The Hunchback Cat—Edmund Crispin — Trouble is My Business—Raymond Chandler — The Adventure of Abraham Lincoln’s Clue—Ellery Queen — See No Evil—Rex Stout — Yesterday I Lived!—Ray Bradbury — The Chill—Ross Macdonald — The Murder of Santa Claus—P. D. James — Never Shake a Family Tree—Donald E. Westlake — Death Notes—Ruth Rendell — Sadie When She Died—Ed McBain

    Each Christmas Eve thereafter, fans rejoiced when Johnson sent out a new short story featuring an episode in Walt’s life that doesn’t appear in the novels; over the years, many have asked why they can’t buy the stories in book form.Wait for Signs collects those beloved stories—and one entirely new story, “Petunia, Bandit Queen of the Bighorns”—for the very first time in a single volume, regular trade hardcover. With glimpses of Walt’s past from the incident in “Ministerial Aide,” when the sheriff is mistaken for a deity, to the hilarious “Messenger,” where the majority of the action takes place in a Port-A-Potty, Wait for Signs is a necessary addition to any Longmire fan’s shelf and a wonderful way to introduce new readers to the fictional world of Absaroka County, Wyoming.

    Much to his horror, the future part begins to come true.