Noir fiction Books

When Cody, a Texas private investigator, is hired to look into what should be a straightforward missing person case, he soon realizes that he's taken on more than he bargained for. The facts surrounding the disappearance of Fort Worth businessman's...

What happens when the safety of your home is no longer safe?Every Friday night during lockdown, six friends meet onscreen to take part in a quiz.But when it's Barton Hinton's turn to host the event, he introduces a set of personal questions that clearly...

Love, betrayal, and a deadly secret swirl through the icy waters of Alaska's Inside Passage...Tony Flaner's impulsive escape sends him on a thrilling adventure, where he unravels the tangled web surrounding a college crush turned murder suspect. Can he...

"The Forever Game by Jeffrey James Higgins is a tautly-plotted thriller bursting with both action and depth. Higgins himself has 'been there and done that,' and this experience reveals itself on every page. I've no doubt readers will be hungry for more...

​By 2:27 on a Thursday afternoon, the one-legged man from Room 8 at 147 Loxitor Avenue had been beaten to death with a lead pipe. Twenty-eight minutes later, Detective Mike O'Shea is testifying in a stuffy courtroom, unaware that, within an hour, he will...

"Never Been Found is a murder mystery that will soothe your crime-solving, clue-finding itch and delight your inner detective." -Authors ReadingThe first installment of the Tomas O'Malley Mystery series.Long-time Chicago homicide detective has...

A Bullet for the Angel is a murder mystery set in 1959 San Francisco during the twilight of the Beatnik Era in North Beach and the dawn of urban gentrification in the Fillmore.Though John Maletesta leads a mostly uneventful life as a white college...

“Morris hits it out of the park with this third novel of her Red Queen mystery trilogy. It is smart, fast-paced, and utterly contemporary with plot lines of disturbing hate groups and higher education’s attempts to teach students how to...

"If Raymond Chandler had turned a steely eye to the notorious Hollywood casting couch, the result might well be called Someone To Watch Over Me."-Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses and CloudmakerHollywood, 1947. Jack Shannon, a former actor whose...

A one-time scrub for the Brooklyn Dodgers is shot to death in the Citi Field press box during a visit to New York City. Soon afterward, a couple of similar shootings of a restaurant cook on a subway platform and an accountant on the West Side Highway...

Private investigator Paul Finley receives a packet of old police reports from a former colleague. Most of the reports describe cases that have been squashed or sidetracked for power interests. One of them questions the accidental death of Finley's wife...

Fireboat men must be not only firemen, but sailors, divers, engineers and police: dangerous callings, all. Collected for the first time, this colorful series centers around Gunboat Brendan and the tragic problem he met below the murky harbor waters...

“…an interesting [thriller] series about a broken and damaged man named Zander.” –N’West Iowa ReviewZander was restless. His bar business with Fats in Frisco was going better than expected. It wasn’t enough. Life was...

Retired backpacking friends Sti and Rob are secretly asked to investigate the death of a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power employee, killed in the Los Angeles Aqueduct decades earlier. The death was ruled an accident, but the victim’s wife...

When Blood Curdles, the third gripping story from Hyacinth Brown, tells the twisted story of detectives Charles Meldrum and Chris Hasten.Once Meldrum retires from the force and makes a wise investment in the diamond business, he finds himself extremely...

Was she an angel from above, or a walking time bomb of doom?His life having crumbled, Blake Gladstone returns to his hometown of Santa Fe, and tries to settle back into the unsatisfying life he'd had before he left for Florida.When he meets Denise, a...

Alan Douglas found himself in a macabre masquerade that could only have one ending-murder. He wore another man's face. He lived with another man's woman. And he was to die another man's death.

BY DAY-A PART-TIME SECRETARY

A tough taut tale of gun running in the bloody Caribbean-where some men fought for liberty...others for lust!

The 1960 Sleaze-Noir classic!Clint Mayer is a big man with big dreams. Or so he thinks. When Clint leaves Beaverkill for the rough and tumble dock town of Wilton, he hooks up with Charlie Fletcher, good time saloon owner and businessman. One of the...

A MAN WITH A CRAVING HE COULD NEITHER ACCEPT OR DESTROY!Jeff Stoner was a cop who kept the law during the day. But the night drove him into whiskey-drenched rooms and the arms of a redhead -any redhead.

Originally published in 1941.The nightmare tale of the life and death of Dillon, American gangster. From the first to the last page, the ruthlessness of an inhuman killer is set down with stark realism. Chase's second book.

Originally published in 1952.An open and shut case of murder! Matt Ranzino had sworn off sleuthing; he'd had a bellyful of violence. But when a beautiful blonde was murdered and Matt was asked to solve the crime, he took the job. When the blonde's...

The rock was about the size of a man's head. A beautiful rock, about twenty pounds of it, and somehow I had to get over to it. The minute I saw it I knew that rock was just the thing I needed. This is going to take some doing, I thought, but I have to...

Who? Who out of all the men in her past could have hated Frieda enough to kill? With which one had she been the impetuous-and the dangerous-mistress?

"Several million dollars of that Russian gold is in a numbered account in the Banque du Shebab-Syrie. I know the name of the man who controls that account, as well as untold millions more in numbered accounts in Switzerland. That man is here in the...

Old Cleave should have known better than to use a whip. But no man ever knew what Beth would do. Her father suspected that she enjoyed killing. Her husband learned the truth too late. And I saw it happen. Saw her and wanted her, and understood least of...

Welcome to the roller-coaster world of professional con men-and the one wild beauty who can out-swindle and outwit them all. Utterly beautiful, smart as a whip, here is the most fascinating confidence woman in modern suspense fiction. Her name is Cathy...

Murder multiplied by SEVEN!Supercharged action and breath-taking suspense in this carnival of crime from the blood-dripped pen of Paul Cain, a connoisseur of crime who writes in the best homicidal tradition of Hammett and Chandler. This is one collection...

Nicky Weaver is an insurance man with a policy of loving women. Each Monday he goes out to collect money for the insurance he's sold, he conducts business with a bevy of beautiful ladies. Young girls, widows, and the wife of a sketchy artist working the...

The night of his grandfather's mysterious death at the Cedars, Bobby Blackburn was, at least until midnight, in New York. He was held there by the unhealthy habits and companion-ships which recently had angered his grandfather to the point of threatening...

The Golden Spoon was strictly for suckers. Located a block north of the river in a renovated three-story building, it sported a white-and-red striped canopy which stretched from plate-glass door to curb, a huge tri-colored neon sign which flashed Follies...

Laurel Dane was no angel. She'd changed men as often as she'd changed her hair color, and there was plenty in her past she'd like to forget. But no one deserved to be beaten to death, and private eye Ed Clive didn't believe that her boyfriend had killed...

He knew the way to a girl's heart-and body! Alice was sweet, Marie was stacked, Lola was loaded... And Nicky...was willing! First published in 1957.

Two men are killed outside the Grand Cafe on Amsterdam Avenue. There's no connection between them, but the widow of one hires Barney Harris, a 250-pound auto mechanic, to sniff out police corruption and find her husband's killer.

THE KINGDOM OF KILLAIN--that's the Duarte, a big-city hotel at the cross 'roads of the world.The grifters, tough lads, girls on the make-all learn to stay away from Hotel Duarte because Johnny Killain's in charge there. That's his turf-a flick of his...

The Statute was knee-high, but it carried a fortune in gold and gems, plus centuries of fame in the art world. Everyone wanted it, and for some no price was too high-love, money, or murder... then Johnny Killain stepped in.The Redhead made the first...

In the late '50s, in the Hollywood branch of Etna Publication Relations, Ken Coate, the head honcho, is sleeping with Kitten. But, in order to get ahead, Kitten is willing to switch her bodily allegiance to the head honcho's heir apparent, Don Prentice...

When Dave Fenner was hired to solve the Blandish kidnapping, he knew the on finding the girl were against him-the cops were still looking for her three months after the ransom had been paid. And the kidnappers, Riley and his gang, had disappeared in to...

Clayton Biner had it all-swimming pools in California, haciendas in Mexico, blue evenings on the French Riviera, all the women he could use. But he wanted more. And he got it when he became involved with a vicious syndicate peddling heroin-the big H, the...

Johnny had a passkey to all the hotel rooms. He wasn't looking for murder, but he found it-and worse!On the streets of a big city people smile and the fights are bright. But there is an altey world of darkness, double-dealing and death; in this world you...

Agent Nathan Hunt makes a decision that will change his life and sets in motion a series of events involving the Maffia, the Russian Mob, the poetry of Charles Bukowski, and the small town of Graham Massachusetts where he has gone to ground as Eddie...

From legendary master Fredric Brown! An ex-newspaperman finds crime going on, based on radio scripts he wrote.

They Gave Him Back His Badge, and Sent Him Down Into the Brutal Throbbing Heart of the Slums. Crooked ex-cop Corey Bradford turns out to be an ideal candidate for an underground police unit known as the Night Squad.First published 1961.

"The place seemed to be filling up with uniformed cops. I felt trapped. I shrugged and headed for the door. Suddenly I wasn't as much angry as plain tired. All I wanted was to get out of this rat trap, return to Rose and our boat; get the hell back to...