"Roger Levy, the protagonist of Alan Furst's fast-moving and funny suspense novel, is an enterprising young man in business for himself. In fact, his is a kind of modern American success story, although it just happens that his business is dealing dope around the various colleges and universities in Pennsylvania. So when he is stopped, his van searched and his "merchandise" discovered by the Pennsylvania police, he has no choice but to appear to cooperate when offered his freedom in exchange for complicity in an apparent CIA murder scheme. Back home in New York the chase is on, and it is only with the help of his lawyer, his street sense and a lot of his own hard-earned cash that Levy is finally able to identify and evade the enemy, uncover the unlikely source of the plot and come away with enough capital to fulfill his own version of the American dream--to retire and live above his own Chinese restaurant, its kitchen available to him twenty-four hours a day. Set in the last days of the sixties, Your Day in the Barrel is at once a fond spoof of the suspense genre and a fiercely contemporary thriller told in the truly original voice of a young writer making his highly auspicious debut." -- Book jacket flap.

Amateur detective Rabbi Daniel Winter is faced with the greatest puzzle of his career--just who is his friend Noah Stark? And why does Winter's fiancee so dislike the psychiatrist? When Noah dies a brutal death, Rabbi Winter soon learns that appearances can be deceiving--and deadly.

Juliet Applebaum juggles the demands of her two young children while investigating the disappearance of her young Hasidic woman babysitter.

Former Washington Post reporter Jason Martin knows there's something secretive going on in the high echelons of politics, and he's determined to find a way to prove it. Beautiful and naïve Dorothy Curtis becomes the key to Jason's plan, which he hopes will put them both back on track. Can he give the sextet of the most powerful men in Washington an expiration date on their greedy endeavors? When Dorothy's body is found at the bottom of the Duke Ellington Memorial Bridge, everyone assumes it was suicide over a lover. But Fiona Fitzgerald, a top Metropolitan Police Department detective, has her doubts. Fiona knows that in this town, power and money come before love. Unfortunately, this death hits a little too close to home, and Fiona wrestles with her own feelings about love as she finds herself empathizing with Dorothy. When Fiona and Jason collide, the power lies in the truths they reveal, truths that will bring down the sextet and help them both come to terms with their own demons. American Sextet is the second book in the Fiona Fitzgerald Mystery series.

Hailed as one of the "top ten women who write superior crime fiction" by the Los Angeles Times, award-winning author Rochelle Krich adds another superb novel of mystery, murder, and icy suspense to her outstanding collection. Dead Air stars Krich's popular LAPD Homicide Detective Jessie Drake in a case that begins with a surprise visit from an old friend and quickly turns into a heart-wrenching, life and death drama that rocks the city. Jessie is astonished when her closest high school confidant, who hasn't been in touch for almost two years, shows up at her door with an alarming tale of being harassed by an unseen stalker. Jessie's friend is now "Dr. Renee," a popular radio talk show therapist who doles out quick-fix no-nonsense advice to troubled callers on everything from lackluster marriages to steamy illicit affairs. Now Renee is desperately frightened and convinced Jessie can help her. Skeptical, and with little to go on, Jessie agrees to investigate---just as a favor. But Jessie's interest quickly turns professional when Renee's six-year-old daughter Molly is kidnapped---and the child's nanny murdered. Renee and her estranged husband Barry, already in a fierce battle over custody, trade angry charges of blame and suspicion while Jessie tracks a bizarre series of events that began a few weeks earlier when a battered wife phoned Dr. Renee for help. Now the woman's crazed husband blames the radio therapist for handing out advice that has ruined his marriage. And---on the air for all to hear---he threatens revenge. With a child as a pawn, a killer plays a chilling game where he holds all the cards---and he's chosen Jessie to be LAPD's top player. As the hours tick by, he uses the radio talk show to up the ante, sending shocking waves of horror and disbelief through the city and terror into the hearts of loved ones. And under the hot glare of media scrutiny, Jessie works feverishly against the clock to beat him at his own game.Hailed as one of the "top ten women who write superior crime fiction" by the Los Angeles Times, award-winning author Rochelle Krich adds another superb novel of mystery, murder, and icy suspense to her outstanding collection. DEAD AIR stars Krich's popular LAPD Homicide Detective Jessie Drake in a case that begins with a surprise visit from an old friend and quickly turns into a heart-wrenching, life and death drama that rocks the city. Jessie is astonished when her closest high school confidant, who hasn't been in touch for almost two years, shows up at her door with an alarming tale of being harassed by an unseen stalker. Jessie's friend is now "Dr. Renee," a popular radio talk show therapist who doles out quick-fix no-nonsense advice to troubled callers on everything from lackluster marriages to steamy illicit affairs. Now Renee is desperately frightened and convinced Jessie can help her. Skeptical, and with little to go on, Jessie agrees to investigate---just as a favor. But Jessie's interest quickly turns professional when Renee's six-year-old daughter Molly is kidnapped---and the child's nanny murdered. Renee and her estranged husband Barry, already in a fierce battle over custody, trade angry charges of blame and suspicion while Jessie tracks a bizarre series of events that began a few weeks earlier when a battered wife phoned Dr. Renee for help. Now the woman's crazed husband blames the radio therapist for handing out advice that has ruined his marriage. And---on the air for all to hear---he threatens revenge. With a child as a pawn, a killer plays a chilling game where he holds all the cards---and he's chosen Jessie to be LAPD's top player. As the hours tick by, he uses the radio talk show to up the ante, sending shocking waves of horror and disbelief through the city and terror into the hearts of loved ones. And under the hot glare of media scrutiny, Jessie works feverishly against the clock to beat him at his own game. BHailed as one of the "top ten women who write superior crime fiction" by the Los Angeles Times, award-winning author Rochelle Krich adds another superb novel of mystery, murder, and icy suspense to her outstanding collection. DEAD AIR stars Krich's popular LAPD Homicide Detective Jessie Drake in a case that begins with a surprise visit from an old friend and quickly turns into a heart-wrenching, life and death drama that rocks the city. Jessie is astonished when her closest high school confidant, who hasn't been in touch for almost two years, shows up at her door with an alarming tale of being harassed by an unseen stalker. Jessie's friend is now "Dr. Renee," a popular radio talk show therapist who doles out quick-fix no-nonsense advice to troubled callers on everything from lackluster marriages to steamy illicit affairs. Now Renee is desperately frightened and convinced Jessie can help her. Skeptical, and with little to go on, Jessie agrees to investigate---just as a favor. But Jessie's interest quickly turns professional when Renee's six-year-old daughter Molly is kidnapped---and the child's nanny murdered. Renee and her estranged husband Barry, already in a fierce battle over custody, trade angry charges of blame and suspicion while Jessie tracks a bizarre series of events that began a few weeks earlier when a battered wife phoned Dr. Renee for help. Now the woman's crazed husband blames the radio therapist for handing out advice that has ruined his marriage. And---on the air for all to hear---he threatens revenge. With a child as a pawn, a killer plays a chilling game where he holds all the cards---and he's chosen Jessie to be LAPD's top player. As the hours tick by, he uses the radio talk show to up the ante, sending shocking waves of horror and disbelief through the city and terror into the hearts of loved ones. And under the hot glare of media scrutiny, Jessie works feverishly against the clock to beat him at his own game. B

A parody of detective stories features Mac Slade as he tries to avoid mobsters and find a missing Hollywood private eye.

Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Detective

The clock is ticking for Fiona FitzGerald. The clock is ticking both figuratively and biologically. During Fiona FitzGerald's pursuit to conceive a child, a powerful female pro-life Senator is found dead. It appears to be suicide, but Fiona is puzzled and continues to investigate. The case gets even more baffling when one shocking clue contradicts the entire investigation.

A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, a defiant and eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high-school teacher on "moral grounds", is attempting to clear up the mystery of his father's death forty years after the fact. He is gradually and irresistibly drawn into a web of suspicion in which images of an underground world linger obsessively: the organization of deaf-mutes whose nightmarish presence recalls the Single Party itself; the polite and timid informer, with his modest, homely reports; the black dog who has the same name as, and seems to be a metamorphosis of, the man pursued by Tolea - an elusive photographer who has left an astonishing photo archive of Communist society. Shot through with black humor and poetry, The Black Envelope is a thoroughly modern exploration of love and guilt, vulnerability and death, estrangement, hope, and human solidarity.

A Nick Hoffman / Academic Mystery, Book 3 - Mayhem at the State University of Michigan: Is it murder...or another faculty meeting? Filled with caustic humor about university life and written with literate style and grace, The Death of a Constant Lover escalates Nick Hoffman's involvement with mayhem and faculty meetings. When the son of a professor is murdered on a campus bridge, Nick's presence at the scene puts him right where he can't afford to be: in the middle of trouble. With his tenure review coming up, he's been warned by his department chair to avoid bad publicity. But Nick is forced to wade in deeper anyway, inexorably drawn into yet another risky investigation in the surprisingly cutthroat world of academia. He may be surrounded by academics with deadly agendas, but he's armed with the hope that his wit and insight will be enough to avert the death of his career... and maybe his own as well. A Lambda Literary Awards Finalist, this new edition contains a 2020 foreword by Brad Shreve (Mitch O'Reilly series) as well as a new introduction by the author.

A Nick Hoffman / Academic Mystery, Book 4 - The fourth novel in the highly acclaimed series begins on a high note. It appears that Nick's career is finally moving in the right direction, and the celebrity that comes with solving murders has brought him more students than he can possibly handle. But things are never calm at the State University of Michigan: Nick's partner's career seems to be taking a downturn, a new faculty member is causing a lot of nasty talk, and cryptic messages are showing up in Nick's mailbox. What turns up next is a corpse - and some very unsettling thoughts for the reluctant sleuth. Lev Raphael is a Lambda Literary Awards winner and multiple nominee for several books. This new edition in his Nick Hoffman series contains a 2021 foreword by Meg Perry (Jamie Brodie series).

"No Room at the Morgue came out after Jean-Patrick Manchette had transformed French crime fiction with such brilliantly plotted, politically charged, unrelentingly violent tales as Nada and The Mad and the Bad. Here, inspired by his love of Dashiell Hammett, Manchette introduces Eugene Tarpon, private eye, a sometime cop who has set up shop after being kicked off the force for accidentally killing a political demonstrator. Months have passed, and Tarpon desultorily tries to keep in shape while drinking all the time. No one has shown up at the door of his office in the midst of the market district of Les Halles. Then the bell rings and a beautiful woman bursts in, her hands dripping blood. It's Memphis Charles, her roommate's throat has been cut, and Memphis can't go to the police because they'll only suspect her. Can Tarpon help? Well, somehow he can't help trying. Soon bodies mount, and the craziness only grows"--

[Read by Mark Peckham] A jealous widow won't rest until she gets back everything that is rightfully hers in this exciting tale by Ellery Queen. hen Barney Street, the fixer, was in Holland in World War II, his life had been saved by a German soldier. Now Barney is dead and his two million dollar estate is left entirely to the soldier who saved him, Milo Hacha. But that fortune comes with a death sentence, for Barney's widow, Estelle, won't rest until she gets back everything that is rightfully hers. She sends Steve Longacre, once one of Barney's boys, to Europe to find Hacha, trailing him from Holland to Switzerland, to Vienna, and finally to Prague. Longacre has Hacha is on the run, fleeing love, money, and a velvet-lined coffin . . .

Book by Queen, Ellery

When Frank Behr’s friend and mentor is murdered without any apparent motive, he thirsts for answers and retaliation. But before he can make headway in the dead-end investigation, a private firm approaches him with a delicate proposition: two of its detectives have gone missing, and the firm wants Behr to find out what happened to them. The search for the missing detectives takes Behr into the recesses of Indianapolis’s underworld, a place rife with brutality and vice where Behr uncovers a shocking thread connecting the missing detectives to his friend’s brutal murder, and, in the process, an ominous, deadly new breed of crime family.

Four narrators, a student from a café, a private detective hired by an aggrieved husband, the heroine herself and one of her lovers, construct a portrait of Jacqueline Delanque, otherwise known as Louki. The daughter of a single mother who works in the Moulin Rouge, Louki grows up in poverty in Montmartre. Her one attempt to escape her background fails when she is rejected from the Lycée Jules-Ferry. She meanders on through life, into a cocaine habit, and begins frequenting the Café Condé, whose regulars call her "Louki". She drifts into marriage with a real estate agency director, but finds no satisfaction with him or his friends and so makes the simple decision not to return to him one evening. She turns instead to a young man almost as aimless and adrift as she, but who perhaps loves her all the same. Ever-present through this story is the city of Paris, almost another character in her own right. This is the Paris of 'no-man's-lands', of lonely journeys on the last metro, or nocturnal walks along empty boulevards; of cafés where the lost youth wander in, searching for meaning, and the older generation sift through their memories of their own long-gone adolescence. Translated from the French by Euan Cameron

Sun. Sin. Sex. Scandal - St. Tropez! For the rich and famous, it's not always fun in the sun... Having recently ended an abusive marriage, the beautiful and filthy rich Contessa Carlotta di Ponti looks to find true love on the beautiful French beaches of the Côte d'Azur. And what better place to find love than the playground of the wealthy and beautiful, the exquisite enclave of St. Tropez. With the annual party season kicking into high gear at billionaire Harry Silver's palatial mansion, tragedy soon strikes paradise. Among the high fashion, nude sunbathing and heavy drinking a bad oyster, a fatal wasp sting, and a faulty cliff railway have changed the mood of the party-goers. Death is in the air and these appear to be no accidents. Is there something far more sinister coming down upon the wealthy party-goers of the usually festive St. Tropez? The gorgeous detective Gabrielle Poulpe makes it her mission to save the day, as well as the financial security of the town, and find the murderer in their midst. Otherwise, life in this sanctified corner of France could change forever. Can Gabrielle find the suspect before they strike again? St. Tropez is known as the ultimate playground of the rich and famous and thrives on the mega-money spent here, but now, it's riddled with threats from within which is scaring everyone away...

Stark is an endangered species. He's the last Jewish private detective in the south Bronx and his days may be numbered. It's the summer of 1965: the Yankees are making another pennant run, the war in Vietnam is heating up, hemlines are rising and the old neighborhood is changing. These days it's easier to stumble on a mugging than to find a good bagel. Stark is not a tough guy. In the trade, he's what's known as a peeper. His business is adultery and his weapon is a camera with a long lens not a snub-nose revolver. But Stark's life is beginning to unravel. His wife left him, his secretary hates him, his mother wants to mother him, he can't shake his shrink's voice from his head and he's got a strange pain in his chest. Then things go from bad to worse. He witnesses a shocking murder and suddenly Stark goes from being the hunter to the hunted, as he races through a decaying world of bookies, transvestites, loan sharks, slum lords and thugs for hire. "Stark in the Bronx" is the dazzling first novel by acclaimed historian Saul Landau. A kind of comic noir, Landau's atmospheric novel is both thrilling and hilarious: imagine the "Maltese Falcon" narrated by Woody Allen.Praise for Saul Landau and Stark: "Saul Landau, like the narrator of 'The Great Gatsby, marvels at how the rich so joyously make messes secure in the knowledge that others will clean up. But what if, one day, they don't?" -- Gore Vidal"You'll believe him, laugh with him, weep and get off your ass." -- John Berger, author "Ways of Seeing"

Warren Adler is the acclaimed author of 25 novels, published in 30 languages. Two of his books, "The War of the Roses" and "Random Hearts" were made into major motion pictures. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and New York City. Fiona FitzGerald, senator's daughter turned Washington, D.C., homicide detective, is called in to investigate when the daughter of a prominent lawyer is found murdered. All clues begin to point to a revered Supreme Court Justice with a sadomasochistic fetish. The Ties That Bind is the sixth book in Warren Adler's Fiona FitzGerald series. The first mystery, American Quartet, was on The New York Times list of top ten crime novels of the year. Try the other Fiona mysteries: American Quartet, American Sextet, Senator Love, Immaculate Deception, and The Witch of Watergate. "Adler sets well-connected Washington homicide dick Fiona FitzGerald another high profile puzzle most satisfying." .Kirkus Reviews "The Welcome return of an intense, likeable heroine." .St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Warren Adler is the acclaimed author of 25 novels, published in 30 languages. Two of his books, "The War of the Roses" and "Random Hearts" were made into major motion pictures. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and New York City. Fiona FitzGerald, senator's daughter turned Washington, D.C., homicide detective, is called in to investigate when the stunning wife of the Austrian Ambassador is kidnapped and murdered. Soon, bones belonging to a vanished young girl are discovered, and both murders share the same starling clues that point to a powerful and seductive Senator. Besides solving the mystery, will Fiona submit to the powerful sexual forces of "Senator Love?" Senator Love is the third book in Warren Adler's Fiona FitzGerald series. The first mystery, American Quartet, was on The New York Times list of top ten crime novels of the year. Try the other Fiona mysteries: American Quartet, American Sextet, Immaculate Deception, The Witch of Watergate and The Ties That Bind. "A fast-paced political mystery Adler's depiction of Washington rings true. Sure to entertain." .Booklist "Tightly-plotted everything that fans of political intrigue could want." .Mystery News "A fingernail chewer plus... a quirky mix of politics, police, protocol and high-noon drama." .San Antonio Express-News "Well-written and worldly a particularly satisfying crime novel." .Pittsburgh Press