Time Noir

Debauched, divorced, and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days across the American Southwest, he travels from from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father - comedian is the only title Schafer has left. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when the opportunity doesn't come - or worse - it comes and goes?

On the 12th floor of the Acme Building, on a cold February day in St. Paul, Guy Noir looks down the barrel of a loaded revolver in the hands of geezer gangster Joey Roast Beef, who is demanding to hear what lucrative scheme Guy is cooking up with stripper-turned-women's-studies-professor Naomi Fallopian. Everyone wants to know, and Guy faces them one by one, as he and Naomi pursue a dream of earning gazillions by selling a surefire method of dramatic weight loss.

It’s been seven years since Gloomy Knob landed in the Ted Stevens High-Security Federal Penitentiary and five years since the end of the war, the one North Korea started when they sent a missile to Cold Storage, Alaska. Serving a life sentence for the murder of his sister, Gloomy spends his time trying to forget about the past. Then one day, Gloomy is snatched from his off-site work station. Instead of celebrating his newfound freedom, Gloomy comes unmoored - he feels he belongs in prison. But his kidnappers believe Gloomy knows where a second nuclear warhead is hidden.

Crime writer Julia Gooden has just completed the most important story of her life - a book about her beloved brother's childhood abduction and how she found his killer after 30 years. But that hasn't taken her focus off her day job - especially with what looks to be a serial killer terrorizing the city. Female runners are being snatched off jogging trails, then slaughtered in abandoned churches. As Julia begins investigating, with help from Detective Raymond Navarro, she realizes just how personal this case has become.

There's a different schemer or slimeball behind every door: cocaine duckpins who have survived only by the dumbest fortune, hard-luck gigolos desperate to score, undercover cops busting undercover cops who are running sting operations on undercover cops.

1970s Mexico City: while student protests and political unrest consume the city, Maite escapes from her humdrum life in the stories of passion and danger that fill the latest issue of Secret Romance. She is deeply envious of her neighbour, Leonora, a beautiful art student who lives the life of excitement and intrigue Maite craves - so when she disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite jumps at the chance to uncover Leonora's secrets. Maite is not the only one searching for the missing girl.

Each contributor presents a brand new story set in a distinct neighborhood. Brooklyn Noir mixes masters of the mystery genre with the best of New York’s literary fiction community - and, of course, leaves room for new blood. These brilliant and chilling stories see crime striking in communities of Russians, Jamaicans, Hasidic Jews, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Irish and many other ethnicities - in the most diverse urban location on the planet.

Four days before Christmas, eight-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, twenty-eight-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and forty-eight-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family. So begins Jinwoo Chong's dazzling time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself.

Ten seconds before the crash, Cate and Aiden Gascoigne are recorded on CCTV. The couple are laughing—happy, untroubled. Then their car plunges into a ninety-foot ravine. The impact should kill them. And if that doesn't, the fire will. Within seconds, the vehicle is an inferno—with the Gascoignes trapped inside. But when fire crews arrive at the scene, they find something impossible. The vehicle is empty. Cate and Aiden have vanished. Now only missing persons investigator David Raker can solve the mystery.

In November 2014 Arla Macleod bludgeoned her mother, father and sister to death with a hammer. Now incarcerated at a medium-security mental-health institution, Arla will speak to no one but Scott King, an investigative journalist, whose Six Stories podcasts have become an internet sensation. King finds himself immersed in an increasingly complex case, interviewing five witnesses and Arla herself as he questions whether Arla's responsibility for the massacre was a diminished as her legal team made out.

Well past retirement age and feeling his years - but still staying sober one day at a time - Matthew Scudder learns that alcoholics aren't the only ones who count the days since their last slip. Matt's longtime partner, Elaine, tells him of a group of former sex workers who do something similar, helping each other stay out of the life. But when one young woman describes an abusive client who's refusing to let her quit, Elaine encourages her to get help of a different sort. The sort only Scudder can deliver.

A comic vignette in which a carnival barker's valuable watch gets stolen during an illegal poker game. The local sheriff seems in no hurry to apprehend the thief, until a reward is offered.

It starts with a few near-accidents: A car almost swipes Mike Hammer when he’s crossing the street. A junkie robs the notoriously hardboiled detective at knifepoint. A fight on a subway platform comes close to pushing him in front of a train. While any one of these could be a coincidence, together they make a conspiracy—one that Hammer will have to end in order to survive. And when it comes to finishing something—or someone—nobody does it better than Hammer.

Billy and Charlie thought their killing days were behind them. They used to be prolific life-takers, but old age finally caught up with them. Now they are ending their days in a dismal nursing home in Blackpool, with only their memories to keep them going. Memories of murder and mutilation. But when Archie turns up at the home, everything changes. Archie is a breath of fresh air, and he puts new life into Billy and Charlie—and before long, they realise that it's time to start killing again.

Akashic Books’ acclaimed series of original noir anthologies has set a high standard for portraying cities and their neighborhoods in all their dark and violent splendor. Now, Mexico City Noir surpasses that standard with phantasmagorical tales of double-dealing, corruption, violence and self-delusion.... This collection is such a varied literary feast.

A man wakes to find himself below ground in the abandoned subway stations of New York City. He has no idea how he got there, no idea who he is. In his pocket he finds only a wad of blood-stained cash and a deck of playing cards. Once above ground, he rents out a cheap apartment, previously occupied by an enigmatic artist named Max Leider who’d left most everything behind—books, clothes, personal letters. But most peculiar are a series of paintings, each one of a mysterious woman hidden behind a curtain.

The stories in this collection reflect a fundamental truth about Santa Fe: history depends on who's telling it. Too often the story of this city has been told only by the conquerors and the tourism PR firms. Hear the stories that never make the glossy tour brochures: the working class and the underground, the decolonized and the ever-haunted; the Santa Fe only we know.... Conquered and reconquered, colonized and commodified, Santa Fe understands - from historical genocide to the murders of family members - the intimacy of violence.

Tampa Bay joins Miami in representing the (alleged) Sunshine State in the Noir Series arena.

Irish crime-fiction sensation Ken Bruen and cohorts shine a light on the dark streets of Dublin. Dublin Noir features an awe-inspiring cast of writers who between them have won all major mystery and crime-fiction awards. This collection introduces secret corners of a fascinating city and surprise assaults on the "Celtic Tiger" of modern Irish prosperity.

"Providence was founded in 1636 by a rogue named Roger Williams. Williams escaped here when Massachusetts was ready to deport him back to England. In the almost 400 years since, we've become infamous for all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors, including serving as home base for the Patriarca crime family for decades. My very own Uncle Eddie - I can hear Mama Rose screaming at me: 'He wasn't a blood relative! He was related through marriage!' - was gunned down in the Silver Lake section of town in 1964."