Chilling Crime Thrillers with Tantalizing Plot Twists
With twists and turns around every corner, these tantalizing terrors will keep you on your toes from start to finish.
A businessman snatched from an Upper East Side street in broad daylight. A miniature hangman’s noose left at the scene. A nine-year-old girl, the only witness to the crime. With a crime scene this puzzling, forensic expertise of the highest order is absolutely essential. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are called in to investigate.
Soon the case takes a stranger turn: a recording surfaces of the victim being slowly hanged, his desperate gasps the backdrop to an eerie piece of music. The video is marked as the work of The Composer…
Despite their best efforts, the suspect gets away. So when a similar kidnapping occurs on a dusty road outside Naples, Italy, Rhyme and Sachs don’t hesitate to rejoin the hunt.
But the search is now a complex case of international cooperation–and not all those involved may be who they seem. Sachs and Rhyme find themselves playing a dangerous game, with lives all across the globe hanging in the balance.
William “Kid” Collins was once a respected boxer. Now he’s a drifter, on the run after escaping from a mental institution.
One afternoon he meets Fay, a beautiful young widow. She is smart and decent—at least when she’s sober. Soon Collins finds himself involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes drastically wrong almost before it even begins. Because the kid they’ve picked up isn’t like other kids: he’s diabetic and without insulin, he’ll die. Not the safest situation for Collins, a man for whom stress and violence have long gone hand-in-hand.
After Dark, My Sweet once again displays Jim Thompson as the undisputed master of American noir. The basis of James Foley’s critically acclaimed film of the same name, with the sweep of an epic tragedy, Thompson’s classic limns the dangerous territory of honest people all-too-easily sucked into wickedness, with no way out but down.
As he settles into an uneasy retirement, Rebus has given up his favorite vices. There’s just one habit he can’t shake: he can’t let go of an unsolved case. It’s the only pastime he has left and up until now, it’s the only one that wasn’t threatening to kill him. But when Rebus starts reexamining the facts behind the long-ago murder of a glamorous woman at a luxurious hotel–on the same night a famous rock star and his entourage where also staying there–the past comes roaring back to life with a vengeance.
And as soon as Rebus starts asking questions about the long forgotten crime, a fresh body materializes. His inquiries reunite him with his old pals-Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox-as they attempt to uncover the financial chicanery behind the savage beating of an upstart gangster, a crime that suggests the notorious old school crime boss Big Ger Cafferty has taken to retirement as poorly as Rebus himself.
As he connects the mysteries of the past to the those of the present, Rebus learns–the hard way–that he’s not the only one with an insatiable curiosity about what happened in that hotel room forty years ago, and that someone will stop at nothing to ensure that the crime remains ancient history.
A twisted tale of power, corruption, and bitter rivalries in the dark heart of Edinburgh, Rather Be the Devil showcases Rankin and Rebus at their unstoppable best.
Rebus comes out of retirement…to save his nemesis.
Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is feeling the heat. She’s investigating the death of a senior government prosecutor, David Minton, who has friends in high places. When one of their own is killed, the powers that be want answers fast. But Clarke is puzzled: if Minton died in a robbery as everyone thinks, why is nothing missing from his home? The answer may lie not in what was taken, but in what was left behind at the scene—an ominous note.
Malcolm Fox is feeling useless. Shunned by his colleagues because of his past in the Complaints bureau, he’s been reassigned to a grunt detail, helping a surveillance team—one that trusts him even less than his own boss does—track a notorious Glasgow crime family. Helping Clarke with the Minton case is the only thing that makes Fox feel like a real cop.
Newly minted civilian John Rebus is feeling restless. Being a cop is in his blood and he’s failing miserably at retirement. So when Clarke and Fox ask for his help, Rebus doesn’t need long to consider his options. But before he can get his bearings, a call comes from Rebus’s old nemesis—“Big Ger” Cafferty. Someone just fired a bullet through his front window—and sent him a note identical to Minton’s. The normally unflappable old gangster is on edge, but for the life of him Cafferty can’t figure out who he’s wronged. And the only man he trusts with his life is Rebus.
As the cases collide, it’s up to Clarke, Fox, and Rebus to connect the dots and save their unlikely ally Cafferty, whose past harbors a shocking secret that implicates Minton’s friends in an unspeakable crime. Even Dogs in the Wild reunites crime fiction legend Ian Rankin’s greatest characters in an explosive story exploring the darkest corners of our desires.
Clutching the shards, of his shattered life, Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux has rejoined the New lberia police force.
His partner is dead — slain during a condemned prisoner’s bloody flight to freedom that left Robicheaux critically wounded and reawakened the ghost of his haunted, violent past.
Following the trail of the escaped convicts, Robicheaux is soon drawn back to New Orleans. But this time, the stakes are even higher. He’s working for the DEA undercover in an attempt to incriminate Tony Cardo, a clinically insane drug lord. But all Robicheaux’s really got is revenge on the mind. And he’ll only be satisfied when the killers who upended his life have been brought to justice.
Los Angeles, 1950 Red crosscurrents: the Commie Scare and a string of brutal mutilation killings. Gangland intrigue and Hollywood sleaze. Three cops caught in a hellish web of ambition, perversion, and deceit. Danny Upshaw is a Sheriff’s deputy stuck with a bunch of snuffs nobody cares about; they’re his chance to make his name as a cop…and to sate his darkest curiosities. Mal Considine is D.A.’s Bureau brass. He’s climbing on the Red Scare bandwagon to advance his career and to gain custody of his adopted son, a child he saved from the horror of postwar Europe. Buzz Meeks-bagman, ex-Narco goon, and pimp for Howard Hughes-is fighting communism for the money. All three men have purchased tickets to a nightmare.
Sam Capra has one reason to live: to rescue his baby son from the people who abducted him. An ex-CIA agent, Sam now owns bars around the world as cover for his real mission-working undercover for a secret network as mysterious as it is powerful, while using his skills to find his child.
Now the kidnappers have offered a deadly deal: they’ll surrender Sam’s child…if Sam finds and murders the one man who can expose them. Teaming up with a desperate young mother whose daughter is also missing, Sam tracks his prey-and his son-across the country in a dangerous race against time, and must unravel a deadly conspiracy if he’s to rescue the only person in the world that matters to him.
New York, 1933: The city and the nation are in the depths of the Great Depression. The crime families of New York have prospered in this time, but with the coming end of Prohibition, a battle is looming that will determine which organizations will rise and which will face a violent end.
For Vito Corleone, nothing is more important that his family’s future. While his youngest children, Michael, Fredo, and Connie, are in school, unaware of their father’s true occupation, and his adopted son Tom Hagen is a college student, he worries most about Sonny, his eldest child. Vito pushes Sonny to be a businessman, but Sonny-17 years-old, impatient and reckless-wants something else: To follow in his father’s footsteps and become a part of the real family business.
L.A. Confidential is epic “noir”, a crime novel of astonishing detail and scope written by the bestselling author of The Black Dahlia. A horrific mass murder invades the lives of victims and victimizers on both sides of the law. And three lawmen are caught in a deadly spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, and offers no mercy, grants no survivors.
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