Bailey investigates the woman in an attempt to stop the extortion, and as the story unfolds, there are many twists and turns. Following The Double Take, Huggins turned his attention to creating memorable TV shows such as “Maverick,” “The Fugitive,” “City of Angels,” and “The Rockford Files.” Huggins passed away in 2002 at age 87.

    Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.Brand-new stories by: Tom Abrahams, Robert Boswell, Sarah Cortez, Anton DiSclafani, Stephanie Jaye Evans, Wanjiku Wa Ngugi, Adrienne Perry, Pia Pico, Reyes Ramirez, Icess Fernandez Rojas, Sehba Sarwar, Leslie Contreras Schwartz, Larry Watts, and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton.From the introduction by Gwendolyn Zepeda:In a 2004 essay, Hunter S. Thompson described Houston as a “cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West—which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.” For what it’s worth, that quote is now posted on a banner somewhere downtown and regularly, gleefully repeated by our local feature writers.Houston is a port city on top of a swamp and, yes, it has no zoning laws. And that means it’s culturally diverse, internally incongruous, and ever-changing. At any intersection here, I might look out my car window and see a horse idly munching St. Augustine grass. And, within spitting distance of that horse, I might see a “spa” that’s an obvious brothel, a house turned drug den, or a swiftly rising bayou that might overtake a car if the rain doesn’t let up . . . Overall, this collection represents the very worst our city has to offer, for residents and visitors alike. But it also presents some of our best voices, veteran and emerging, to any reader lucky enough to pick up this book.

    Or the dead guy. Or the steamer trunk. Or the rag doll. If only he hadn’t found any of these things, everything might have been okay. But he had found them. All of them. Now Carson Halliday is on the run, trying his damnedest to keep one step ahead of a dangerous gang of outlaws and mad men. A run leading him from town to town in the dry wasteland of the southern New Mexico desert, over dark hills and dangerous plains, through shantytowns and city streets, and, most frightening of all, into the mysterious depths of the human heart."One of the best of the new breed of writers." —Joe R. Lansdale"A powerful and good writer." —Neil Gaiman"Trent Zelazny is the best hard-boiled noir writer of this generation!" —Sarah L. Covert, Editor of She Never Slept

    She owns a small motor-inn motel on a major highway in South Georgia. The summer heat is still strong in the waning days of October, and she is tired from a long summer season. As the evening progresses, Ginny’s motel begins to fill-up. There is Johnny Benton, a strange motel guest who insists on parking his car behind the motel, a would-be suitor named Don Ferris, a guest that is the catalyst for a long and frightening night, and then there is the dead husband whose long shadow is cast across Ginny’s life like a long heavy rain...

    Megan Abbott’s “Policy” was nominated for the Anthony Award and became the basis for her novel Queenpin, which won the 2008 Edgar Award.

    As a Family Liaison Officer he is always the bearer of bad news - it is his job to tell the friends and family of victims the fate of their loved ones.But Tom is weighted down by crimes both old and new - haunted by the death of his best friend Dani, whose murder has never been solved.When a rare opportunity emerges for Tom to take the lead in a horrific murder investigation, he is determined to get justice for the victim. A young girl has been found in her own home, cut so badly - and so carefully - that she has bled to death, leaving a deliberate pool of blood in the shape of angel wings....

    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.

    Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Following the success of Montreal Noir and Toronto Noir, the Noir Series travels to the west coast of Canada.Brand-new stories by: Linda L. Richards, Timothy Taylor, Sheena Kamal, Robin Spano, Carleigh Baker, Sam Wiebe, Dietrich Kalteis, Nathan Ripley, Yasuko Thanh, Kristi Charish, Don English, Nick Mamatas, S.G. Wong, and R.M. Greenaway.From the introduction by Sam Wiebe:You might wonder what shadows could exist in Vancouver, rain-spattered jewel of the Pacific Northwest. Nestled between the US border and the Coast Mountains, the city’s postcard charms are familiar, even to those who’ve never been here, thanks to the films and TV shows shot in Hollywood North: The X-Files and Deadpool, Rumble in the Bronx and Jason Takes Manhattan. Vancouver is the so-called City of Glass. A nice place, in any case, and much too nice for noir.Looked at from afar, Vancouver may seem idyllic. But living here is different—cold and baffling and occasionally hostile. While outsiders focus on high-test BC bud, locals see a heroin crisis: Vancouver is home to the first legalized safe-injection site in North America, now heavily taxed by overdoses resulting from street drugs cut with fentanyl. It’s ground zero for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, a nationwide catastrophe involving the deaths and disappearances of hundreds of marginalized women. Money and status trample culture and community . . . If Vancouver is a City of Glass, that glass is underneath our feet.

    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.

    Often a desperate blond, a jealous husband, and, of course, a tough-but-tender P.I. the likes of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Perhaps Raymond Chandler summed it up best in his description of Dashiell Hammett's style: "Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it....He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes."Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind, with over half of the stories never published before in book form. Included are thirty-six sublimely suspenseful stories that chronicle the evolutiuon of this quintessentially American art form, from its earliest beginnings during the Golden Age of the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask in the 1920s, to the arrival of the tough digest Manhunt in the 1950s, and finally leading up to present-day hard-boiled stories by such writers as James Ellroy. Here are eight decades worth of the best writing about betrayal, murder, and mayhem: from Hammett's 1925 tour de force "The Scorched Face," in which the disappearance of two sisters leads Hammett's never-named detective, the Continental Op, straight into a web of sexual blackmail amidst the West Coast elite, to Ed Gorman's 1992 "The Long Silence After," a gripping and powerful rendezvous involving a middle class insurance executive, a Chicago streetwalker, and a loaded .38. Other delectable contributions include "Brush Fire" by James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raymond Chandler's "I'll Be Waiting," where, for once, the femme fatale is not blond but a redhead, a Ross Macdonald mystery starring Macdonald's most famous creation, the cryptic Lew Archer, and "The Screen Test of Mike Hammer" by the one and only Micky Spillane. The hard-boiled cult has more in common with the legendary lawmen of the Wild West than with the gentleman and lady sleuths of traditional drawing room mysteries, and this direct line of descent is on brilliant display in two of the most subtle and tautly written stories in the collection, Elmore Leonard's "3:10 to Yuma" and John D. MacDonald's "Nor Iron Bars." Other contributors include Evan Hunter (better known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Helen Nielsen, Margaret Maron, Andrew Vachss, Faye Kellerman, and Lawrence Block.Compellingly and compulsively readable, Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is a page-turner no mystery lover will want to be without. Containing many notable rarities, it celebrates a genre that has profoundly shaped not only American literature and film, but how we see our heroes and oursleves.

    It's lean and smart and very good. I say, check it out.” Joe Lansdale Career criminal Longview Moody, on the run from killers, assumes his dead, twin brother's identity as the new Chief of Police of a Texas town that's being terrorized by a Mexican drug cartel. To pull off the deadly deception, Longview desperately works to become the kind of cop and man that his brother was. But when the two lives he’s living converge, he’s forced to embrace the violence within him to get justice...and vengeance. PRAISE FOR ‘DEAD MAN’S BADGE' “Robert Dunn unloads both barrels – DEAD MAN'S BADGE is a fast, furious shootout from beginning to end. This tale of corrupt cops, cartel killers, and one bad guy just trying to make good, lingers like gun smoke. Bloody, dark, and pistol-whip smart, it's Border noir at its best.” J. Todd Scott, author of THE FAR EMPTY “Fans of Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns will find a lot to like.” Publishers Weekly "In Dunn's capable hands, readers will jump onboard for the ride. Dunn is a gifted writer and he opens DEAD MAN'S BADGE with one of the most gripping scenes I've ever read. Fans of grit will love this fast-paced book." Mystery Scene Magazine "Riveting thriller about coming back from the dead, revenge and redemption. The pages fly by even faster than the bodies pile up. DEAD MAN'S BADGE establishes Robert E. Dunn as a formidable new name in hard-boiled fiction." R.G Belsky, author of the Clare Carlson and Gil Malloy mystery series "DEAD MAN'S BADGE sizzles with suspense! Dunn promises action on page one of this thriller and delivers the goods nonstop to the very end." Margaret Mizushima, award-winning author of HUNTING HOUR. "Brutal, vivid, and unforgettable...a modern-day western morality tale in crime-novel wrapping with a blood-red bow. This one will haunt you." -Lee Goldberg, #1 New York Times bestselling author of TRUE FICTION "DEAD MAN’S BADGE is crazy good, a great story, non-stop action, and a brilliantly-crafted hero. Dunn hit it out of the park with this one". -Harry Hunsicker, former executive vice president of the Mystery Writers of America and the author of THE DEVIL’S COUNTRY

    Renowned for their meanness and always armed with their legendary nickel-plated colts, they patrol the streets of Harlem and attempt to keep some semblance of law and order.

    Scott Wolven is such a talent, and his raw, blistering tales of hard-bitten convicts, dodgy informers, and men running from the law make for "the most exciting, authentic collection of short stories I have read in years," says George Pelecanos. Brooding, edgy, and sometimes violent, Controlled Burn's loosely linked stories are each in some way a distillation of hard time -- spent either in prison, the backwoods of Vermont, or the badlands of the American West. Peopled by boxers, drunks, truck drivers, murderers, bounty hunters, drifters traveling under assumed names, and men whose luck ran out a thousand miles ago, these stories feel hard-won from life, and if they are moody and stark, so too are they filled with human longing. Controlled Burn is divided into two sections: "The Northeast Kingdom" and "The Fugitive West." In each, Scott Wolven reveals a broken world where there is no bottom left to hit. In the haunting "Outside Work Detail," convicts stoically dig graves for their fellow prisoners yet reserve their deepest grief for the senseless death of a deer. "Crank" introduces Red Green, a maniacally brilliant addict who brews his own crystal meth in a backwoods lab, and whose high-energy antics inspire both cautious admiration and mortal fear in his business associates. In "Ball Lightning Reported," Red Green's ultimate fate is revealed. In "Atomic Supernova," a revenge-obsessed sheriff deputizes a known cop-killer to help him hunt down a counterfeiter and drug lord. The unexpectedly tender and heartbreaking "The Copper Kings" concerns a father facing the dark truth behind his son's disappearance. And in "Vigilance," a hunted man struggles to escape his past, always yearning for an honorable yet perhaps unreachable future. Powered by a spare, ruminative prose style that recalls the best of Denis Johnson and Thom Jones, Controlled Burn is an unforgettable debut.

    It is our hope that in this anthology you will find a story to love. We come from as varied backgrounds as we do locations. Hawaii to New York, California to Texas, and Texas to Tennessee; we have come together to share our love of storytelling. The characters within these pages are a wondrous mix as well. A flamboyant Knoxville designer, a 1900s investigative reporter, a neurosurgeon, a coroner, a woman dripping of Russian opulence and Parisian elegance, a detective that has simply had enough, and a Tennessee Police Chief all fill the pages and the imagination in Death of Choice. Come along with us to a Children’s Cemetery, 1920’s London, a daisy fresh diner in L.A., a fog shrouded barn, a small town in Tennessee, a Honolulu beach, and meet a collection of short stories from writers that will give you chills, thrills, and a set of tales you will long remember. Our hope is through these intriguing introductions you will discover an author or two you will want to read more of, and get to know better. Each of the authors in this anthology have many more books for you to enjoy. So find that spot where you love to curl up and read, and enjoy this collection of murder, mayhem and mystery. Micheal Maxwell Editor and Compiler September 2015

    Nora ran off with twenty grand, a gram of coke, and his favourite leather jacket, leaving him with little more than a hangover and a Dido soundtrack. But Nora’s sights are on the two hundred grand Farrell supposedly stashed somewhere in the middle of Northumberland, and she’s enlisted the help of her old boyfriend, a former hit man, to retrieve it.Farrell hooks up with an old Army mate, the shoplifting, rotgut-swilling arsonist Jimmy Cobb and sets off after them. When this pair catch up with Nora and her ex, there’s going to be hell to pay, 'cause nobody messes with Farrell and Cobb ...WOLF TICKETS is hardcore Ray Banks – ballsy, breathless and brutal.