A Touch of Death


Charles Williams - 1953
    Original.

They Can't Take Your Name


Robert Justice - 2021
     What happens to a dream deferred--especially when an innocent man's life hangs in the balance? Langston Brown is out of time and options for clearing his name. Wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Mother's Day Massacre, he prepares to face his death. His final hope for salvation lies with his daughter, Liza, who dreamed of a life of music and song but left the prestigious Juilliard School to get a law degree with the intention of clearing her father's name. Just as she comes close to succeeding, it's annouced that Langston will be put to death in thirty days.In a desperate bid to find freedom for her father, Liza enlists the help of Eli Stone, a jazz club owner she met at the classic Five Points venue The Rossonian. Devastated by the tragic loss of his wife, Eli is trying to find solace by reviving the club--but still, he thinks longingly of joining her in death.Everyone has a dream that might come true--but as the dark shadows of the past converge, could Langston, Eli, and Liza be facing a danger that could shatter those dreams forever?

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye


Horace McCoy - 1948
    A Phi Beta Kappa scholar succeds in turning himself into a vicious and completely immoral criminal - a man whose contempt for law, order, and human life drives him relentlessly into a career of unrelieved evil. He escapes from a chain gang to join a pack of gangsters and a millionaire?s daughter falls in love with him, but eventually his past overtakes him. Kiss Tomorrrow Goodbye is McCoy?s most ambitious work and the basis for one of the great gangster movies, starring James Cagney.

Cold Granite


Stuart MacBride - 2005
    Winter in Aberdeen: murder, mayhem and terrible weather! It's DS Logan McRae's first day back on the job after a year off on the sick, and it couldn't get much worse. Four-year-old David Reid's body is discovered in a ditch, strangled, mutilated and a long time dead. And he's only the first. There's a serial killer stalking the Granite City and the local media are baying for blood. Soon the dead are piling up in the morgue almost as fast as the snow on the streets, and Logan knows time is running out. More children are going missing. More are going to die. And if Logan isn't careful, he could end up joining them!

The Poacher's Son


Paul Doiron - 2010
    The next morning Mike gets a call from the police: a beloved local cop has been killed and his father is their prime suspect.Coming to terms with his haunted past and desperate for answers, Mike and a retired warden pilot journey deep into the Maine wilderness to clear his father's name and find out why Jack is on the run. But the only way for Mike to save his father is to find the real killer before the killer finds him.

The Eighth Detective


Alex Pavesi - 2020
    There must be a victim. A suspect. A detective. The rest is just shuffling the sequence. Expanding the permutations. Grant McAllister, a professor of mathematics, once sat down and worked them all out – calculating the different orders and possibilities of a mystery into seven perfect detective stories he quietly published. But that was thirty years ago. Now Grant lives in seclusion on a remote Mediterranean island, counting the rest of his days.Until Julia Hart, a sharp, ambitious editor knocks on his door. Julia wishes to republish his book, and together they must revisit those old stories: an author hiding from his past, and an editor, keen to understand it.But there are things in the stories that don’t add up. Inconsistencies left by Grant that a sharp-eyed editor begins to suspect are more than mistakes. They may be clues, and Julia finds herself with a mystery of her own to solve.

The Echo Killing


Christi Daugherty - 2018
    But for Harper McClain, the timeless beauty and culture that distinguishes her home’s Southern heritage vanishes during the dark and dangerous nights. She wouldn’t have it any other way. Not even finding her mother brutally murdered in their home when she was twelve has made her love Savannah any less.Her mother’s killer was never found, and that unsolved murder left Harper with an obsession that drove her to become one of the best crime reporters in the state of Georgia. She spends her nights with the police, searching for criminals. Her latest investigation takes her to the scene of a homicide where the details are hauntingly familiar: a young girl being led from the scene by a detective, a female victim naked and stabbed multiple times in the kitchen, and no traces of any evidence pointing towards a suspect.Harper has seen all of this before in her own life. The similarities between the murder of Marie Whitney and her own mother’s death lead her to believe they’re both victims of the same killer. At last, she has the chance to find the murderer who’s eluded justice for fifteen years and make sure another little girl isn’t forever haunted by a senseless act of violence―even if it puts Harper in the killer’s cross-hairs…

The Do-Right


Lisa Sandlin - 2015
    Delpha Wade killed a man who was raping her. Wanted to kill the other one too, but he got away. Now, after fourteen years in prison, she’s out. It’s 1973, and nobody’s rushing to hire a parolee. Persistence and smarts land her a secretarial job with Tom Phelan, an ex-roughneck turned neophyte private eye. Together these two pry into the dark corners of Beaumont, a blue-collar, Cajun-influenced town dominated by Big Oil. A mysterious client plots mayhem against a small petrochemical company-why? Searching for a teenage boy, Phelan uncovers the weird lair of a serial killer. And Delpha — on a weekend outing — looks into the eyes of her rapist, the one who got away. The novel's conclusion is classic noir, full of surprise, excitement, and karmic justice. Sandlin's elegant prose, twisting through the dark thickets of human passion, allows Delpha to open her heart again to friendship, compassion, and sexuality.Lisa Sandlin's story "Phelan's First Case" was anthologized in Lone Star Noir and was later re-anthologized in Akashic's Best of the Noir series, USA Noir. The Do-Right is her first full-length mystery. Lisa was born in Beaumont, currently lives and teaches in Omaha, Nebraska, and summers in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Other Woman


Hank Phillippi Ryan - 2012
    Detective Jake Brogan is investigating a possible serial killer that may be hunting down Boston's young women under the city's bridges. As the body count rises and election looms closer, it becomes clear to Jane and Jake that their cases are connected...and that they may be facing a ruthless killer who will stop at nothing to silence a scandal. Dirty politics, dirty tricks, and a barrage of final twists, The Other Woman is the first in an explosive new series from Hank Phillipi Ryan. Seduction, betrayal, and murder—it'll take a lot more than votes to win this election.

Brighton


Michael Harvey - 2016
    Thing is, you gotta kill it first.”Kevin Pearce—baseball star, honor student, the pride of Brighton—was fifteen when he left town in the back of his uncle’s cab. He and his buddy, Bobby Scales, just committed a heinous act of violence for what they thought were the best of reasons. Kevin didn’t want a pass, but he was getting it anyway. Bobby would stay and face the music; Kevin’s future would remain as bright as ever. At least that was the way things were supposed to work. Except in Brighton, things never work the way they’re supposed to. Twenty-seven years later, Kevin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Boston Globe. He’s never been back to his old block, having avoided his family and, especially, Bobby Scales. Then he learns his old friend is the prime suspect in a string of local murders. All of the sudden Kevin’s headed home—to protect a friend and the secret they share. To report this story to the end and protect those he loves, he must navigate not only an elusive, slippery killer, but his own corrupted conscience.A powerhouse of a thriller, Brighton is a riveting and elegiac exploration of promises broken, debts owed, and old wrongs made right . . . no matter what the cost.

And Still, She Wept


T.C. Barnes - 2011
    After having lost his wife to cancer, he is drawn back from the brink of an emotional abyss by the murder of a young girl who looks just like her. With nothing else to assuage his grief, he throws himself into the case with every ounce of passion still left inside him. But with little evidence to go on, his case quickly grows cold. When another victim is killed in exactly the same manner over five hundred miles away, Reilly realizes that there may be a serial killer at work. Going against the advice of his superiors, he flies to North Carolina to continue his hunt for the sadistic murderer. Reilly knows that his only hope of success is to convince the Sheriff of Camden County that both crimes are connected. To his relief, Claire Stiles immediately recognizes the undeniable similarities between both cases. Fueled by the furious and unrelenting desire to find the killer, they work together day and night. Unexpectedly however, they find themselves growing closer in the process. In order to understand what tenuous link binds the victims together, Claire and Reilly leave no stone unturned in their desperate search for the killer. But when yet another girl is abducted, Claire and Reilly must put their own lives on the line in order to stop the madman, before it's too late.

The Rage of Plum Blossoms


Christine M. Whitehead - 2016
    Her husband, Jordan Chang, Annapolis grad and superstar businessman, has been found dead outside their Greenwich Village brownstone. He’s wearing clothes that aren’t his, and was last seen at a place he never went while consorting with people he shouldn’t—and he’s vastly richer than he ought to be, Quinn discovers. Since NYPD has labeled Jordan’s death a suicide, Quinn is on her own to uncover the truth. Courtrooms, Quinn knows. Chanel No. 5, horses, martial arts, and frizzy hair, she knows. Murder, she doesn’t know but she’s learning fast in order to stay alive. With a few clues to work with, including a photo of Jordan with a stunning unknown Asian woman and a copy of a 1986 check payable to Jordan for twelve million dollars, Quinn stalks the back streets of Chinatown, haunted by the need to know what happened that day and why.

The Fields


Erin Young - 2022
    It starts with a body—a young woman found dead in an Iowa cornfield, on one of the few family farms still managing to compete with the giants of Big Agriculture.When Sergeant Riley Fisher, newly promoted to head of investigations for the Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office, arrives on the scene, an already horrific crime becomes personal when she discovers the victim was a childhood friend, connected to a dark past she thought she’d left behind.The investigation grows complicated as more victims are found. Drawn deeper in, Riley soon discovers implications far beyond her Midwest town.

The Damsel


Richard Stark - 1967
    When Ellen Marie Fitzgerald comes in through his window, he dismisses the tale she tells him, until hoods come to find her, and their escape route from political intrigue may well be their last!

Beat the Reaper


Josh Bazell - 2009
    Peter Brown is an intern at Manhattan's worst hospital, with a talent for medicine, a shift from hell, and a past he'd prefer to keep hidden. Whether it's a blocked circumflex artery or a plan to land a massive malpractice suit, he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.Pietro "Bearclaw" Brnwna is a hitman for the mob, with a genius for violence, a well-earned fear of sharks, and an overly close relationship with the Federal Witness Relocation Program. More likely to leave a trail of dead gangsters than a molecule of evidence, he's the last person you want to see in your hospital room.Nicholas LoBrutto, aka Eddy Squillante, is Dr. Brown's new patient, with three months to live and a very strange idea: that Peter Brown and Pietro Brnwa might-just might-be the same person ...Now, with the mob, the government, and death itself descending on the hospital, Peter has to buy time and do whatever it takes to keep his patients, himself, and his last shot at redemption alive. To get through the next eight hours-and somehow beat the reaper.Spattered in adrenaline-fueled action and bone-saw-sharp dialogue, BEAT THE REAPER is a debut thriller so utterly original you won't be able to guess what happens next, and so shockingly entertaining you won't be able to put it down.