Trusted Like the Fox


James Hadley Chase - 1972
    One of them had slain a helpless man to hide the secret of his identity. And he was quite prepared to kill the girl if she tried to double-cross him. But he’d reckoned without that terrible accident — and he was totally unprepared for the insane murderer who made death a ritual with a silver-handled knife.

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.

Young Americans


Josh Stallings - 2015
    A Firebird transports a crew of glitter kids away from the city. Forget the trunk full of cash and illegal firearms. Forget the disco heist and sea of felonies left in their wake. They are five friends happily rolling down thunder road with no horizon in sight. They are YOUNG AMERICANS.

Thuglit Issue 1


Todd RobinsonMike Wilkerson - 2012
    McCauleySPILL SITE by Matthew C. FunkA CLEAN WHITE SUN by Mike WilkersonLUCK by Johnny ShawPLUS: an exclusive first look at Tyrus Books upcoming novel from Todd Robinson, THE HARD BOUNCE

The Bastard Hand


Heath Lowrance - 2011
    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. . . .

Cruel Poetry


Vicki Hendricks - 2007
    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.

Low Down Death Right Easy


J. David Osborne - 2013
    Imagine a Raymond Carver or Jim Thompson for the text message age and that would only begin to get it."-Kris Saknussemm, author of Reverend America Trapped in a rural Oklahoma town fueled by meth and doused in codeine, Arlo Clancy has made it his life's goal to keep his troubled younger brother, Sepp, out of prison. Poverty and the lure of easy drug money were pressure enough, before a gruesome discovery beneath the waters of their favorite fishing hole sent their lives into a tailspin. Torn by cowardice and conscience, the brothers make a fateful decision which will bring them ever-closer to Danny Ames-a vicious enforcer for the local meth trade-and a nightmare world where their only chance of escape might be... LOW DOWN DEATH RIGHT EASY "Working class fiction at its best."-Benjamin Whitmer, author of Pike "A gritty tapestry of subversive drama the likes of which I'd compare to Harmony Korine's Gummo packed in with the terse lines of Bukowski."-Michael J. Seidlinger, author of My Pet Serial Killer

Caught Stealing


Charlie Huston - 2004
    But now Hank is here, working as a bartender and taking care of a cat named Bud who is surely going to get him killed.It begins when Hank’s neighbor, Russ, has to leave town in a rush and hands over Bud in a carrier. But it isn’t until two Russians in tracksuits drag Hank over the bar at the joint where he works and beat him to a pulp that he starts to get the idea: Someone wants something from him. He just doesn’t know what it is, where it is, or how to make them understand he doesn’t have it.Within twenty-four hours Hank is running over rooftops, swinging his old aluminum bat for the sweet spot of a guy’s head, playing hide and seek with the NYPD, riding the subway with a dead man at his side, and counting a whole lot of cash on a concrete floor.All because of two cowboys, two Russian mafia men, and some of the weirdest goons ever assembled in one place. All because of Bud. All because once, in another life, in another world, the only thing Hank wanted was to take third base—without getting caught.

Getting Off


Jill Emerson - 2011
    She goes to bed with him, and she likes that part. Then she kills him, and she likes that even better. On her way out, she cleans out his wallet. She keeps moving, and has a new name for each change of address. She's been doing this for a while, and she's good at it.And then a chance remark gets her thinking of the men who got away, the lucky ones who survived a night with her. She starts writing down names. And now she's a girl with a mission. Picking up their trails. Hunting them down. Crossing them off her list...

Kiss Me, Judas


Will Christopher Baer - 1998
    Red dress, black hair, body like a knife. He takes her back to his room and wakes the next morning in a bathtub full of blood and ice, missing a kidney.Dragging himself from a hospital bed, Phineas discovers he wants to be with Jude like a hunger -- and he wants to find her and kill her. Falling for her is the start of a twisted love story that takes him from the snowy streets of Denver to the high plains of Texas where the boundaries between torturer and victim, killer and accomplice, become nightmarishly distorted.

The Vengeful Virgin


Gil Brewer - 1958
    But that's the life she was trapped in - until she met Jack.Now Shirley and Jack have a plan to put the old man out of his misery and walk away with a suitcase full of cash. But there's nothing like money to come between lovers – money, and other women...

Cassidy's Girl


David Goodis - 1951
    Cassidy had two. One was Mildred, the wife who kept him chained with ties of fear and jealousy and paralyzing sexual need. The other was Doris, a frail angel with a 100-proof halo and a bottle instead of a harp. With those two, Cassidy found that the ride to hell could be twice as fast.Cassidy's Girl has all the traits that made its author a virtuoso of the hard-boiled: a fiercely compelling ploy; characters who self-destruct in spectacularly unpredictable ways; and an insider's knowledge of all the routes to the bottom.

Steel Toes: A Novel


Eddie Little - 2001
    Little writes about the world he used to inhabit, a place filled with drugs, crime and danger at every turn. His electrifying prose brings to life the rough, raw, and seedy life of Boston's underworld where corruption lies at the heart of every deception.Bobbie is a young criminal prodigy. Living in Boston he's approached by a mysterious Greek on behalf of an anonymous shipping tycoon, who wants to commission a theft. The Fogg museum is the target; a collection of ancient Greek coins the score. Everything goes fine with the burglary, but with easy street just around the corner Bobbie's life takes an unexpected twist and his big score evaporates. With his life on the line, Bobbie must learn who he can trust when trusting anyone can make you lose everything. Steel Toes is as close to reality as fiction can get. Little draws you in with his knife sharp writing, his authentic and unflinching characters and plot as tight and strong as the hold of addiction.

The Killer Inside Me


Jim Thompson - 1952
    A deputy sheriff, Lou's known to the small-time criminals, the real-estate entrepreneurs, and all of his coworkers--the low-lifes, the big-timers, and everyone in-between--as the nicest guy around. He may not be the brightest or the most interesting man in town, but nevertheless, he's the kind of officer you're happy to have keeping your streets safe. The sort of man you might even wish your daughter would end up with someday.But behind the platitudes and glad-handing lurks a monster the likes of which few have seen. An urge that has already claimed multiple lives, and cost Lou his brother Mike, a self-sacrificing construction worker who fell to his death on the job in what was anything but an accident. A murder that Lou is determined to avenge--and if innocent people have to die in the process, well, that's perfectly all right with him.In The Killer Inside Me, Thompson goes where few novelists have dared to go, giving us a pitch-black glimpse into the mind of the American Serial Killer years before Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, in the novel that will forever be known as the master performance of one of the greatest crime novelists of all time.

Bust


Ken Bruen - 2006
    When you hire someone to kill your wife, don’t hire a psychopath.2. Drano is not the best tool for getting rid of a dead body.3. Those locks on hotel room doors? Not very secure.4. A curly blond wig isn’t much of a disguise.5. Secrets can kill.