February 2024
Nobody's Angel is by Jack Clark. Two killers stalk the streets of Chicago. Can one taxi driver corner them both? Eddie Miles is one of a dying breed: a Windy City hack who knows every street and back alley of his beloved city and takes its recent descent into violence personally. But what can one driver do about a killer targeting streetwalkers or another terrorizing cabbies? Precious little—until the night he witnesses one of them in action…
March 2024
Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray is by Christian Klaver. Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson have tickets to the newly arrived Circus of Amun-Ra. Holmes is puzzled by his brother Mycroft’s cryptic gift but is intrigued enough to attend the next production. The performers, dressed as wondrous half-animal, half-human gods from Egyptian mythology, display superhuman agility and stunts. But they speak no Arabic, sequester themselves in the stables after each show and take orders from a mysterious ring master who is yet to be seen. And then one of the performers is murdered. Holmes’s enquires lead him to a townhouse near Gorsvenor Square, the home of the beautiful and secretive socialite Dorian Gray. As Holmes digs deeper, he learns Gray is hiding much more than his involvement in a murder in a darkly fantastical tale of lies, experimentation, hypnosis and wicked ambition.
Death Comes Too Late is by Charles Ardai. Collected here for the first time anywhere are the author’s 20 finest stories, including his Edgar-winning “The Home Front,” about death and repentance during World War II; the Shamus Award finalist “Nobody Wins,” about a brutal gangland enforcer searching for the woman he loves; and year’s-best selections such as “A Bar Called Charley’s,” about a traveling salesman’s most grueling night on the road. From Brazil at Carnival to Times Square, from Tijuana, Mexico to history’s first gunshot in 11th-century China, Ardai will take you to some of the most dangerous places in the world – and the darkest corners of the human heart.
The Actor (aka Memory) is by Donald E Westlake. The crime was over in a minute. The consequences lasted a lifetime. Hospitalized after a liaison with another man’s wife ends in violence, Paul Cole has just one goal: to rebuild his shattered life. But with his memory damaged, the police hounding him, and no way even to get home, Paul’s facing steep odds – and a bleak fate if he fails…
Vinyl Detectives: Noise Floor is by Andrew Cartmel. The Vinyl Detective enters the fraught and frenzied realm of electronic dance music. Lambert Ramkin aka Imperium Dart, techno trickster and ambient music wizard of the 1990s, has gone walkabout, disappearing from his palatial home in Kent. This isn’t the first time he’s pulled a vanishing act, but he’s never been gone so long before and his wife—wives, actually; it’s complicated—are worried and hire the Vinyl Detective to find the old rascal. But does Lambert, a man known for his love of outlandish and elaborate pranks, really want to be found? And are the increasingly strange scenarios that the Vinyl Detective and his friends keep finding themselves in due to his trickery or something far more sinister?
April 2024
The Murder of Mr Ma is by John Shen Yen Nee and S J Rozan. Two unlikely allies race through the cobbled streets of 1920s London in search of a killer targeting Chinese immigrants. London, 1924. When shy academic Lao She meets larger-than-life Judge Dee Ren Jie, his life abruptly turns from books and lectures to daring chases and narrow escapes. Dee has come to London to investigate the murder of a man he’d known during World War I when serving with the Chinese Labour Corps. No sooner has Dee interviewed the grieving widow than another dead body turns up. Then another. All stabbed to death with a butterfly sword. Will Dee and Lao be able to connect the threads of the murders—or are they next in line as victims? John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan’s groundbreaking collaboration blends traditional gong’an crime fiction and the most iconic aspects of the Sherlock Holmes canon. Dee and Lao encounter the aristocracy and the street-child telegraph, churchmen and thieves in this clever, cinematic mystery that’s as thrilling and visual as an action film, as imaginative and transporting as a timeless classic.
Sherlock Holmes: The Gentleman Burglar is by Sam Siciliano. Sherlock Holmes and his cousin, Vernier, have been hired by the Baron of Creuse to find the legendary lost treasure of the kings of France. Trekking from La Belle Époque Paris to a chateau in the rural center of France, Holmes, Vernier and a new companion must employ all their wit to solve the fiendishly difficult puzzle of the Hollow Needle. After deciphering the meaning of the phrase “st. s. 138” and decoding a mysterious document, they realize the answer lies to the north in Normandy near the town of Étretat. Together, they follow a long-buried path to an ancient secret, but fresh mysteries and new complications immediately arise. But other forces are at work, and jealous hands seek to interfere with Holmes’s work. He must team up with the notorious gentleman-burglar, Arsène Lupin, if he is to find the treasure and avert an international disaster at sea.
May 2024
Into The Night is by Cornell Woolrich & completed by Lawrence Block. An innocent woman lies dead in the street, felled by a stray bullet. Now it’s up to the woman who killed her to investigate the dead woman’s life and pick up its cut-short threads, carrying out a mission of vengeance on her behalf against the man she loved and lost – and the nightclub-singing femme fatale responsible for splitting them apart. Begun in the last years of his life by noir master Cornell Woolrich, the haunted genius responsible for such classics as Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, and Phantom Lady, and completed decades later by acclaimed novelist and MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block (A Walk Among the Tombstones, Eight Million Ways to Die), Into The Night – available here for the first time in more than 35 years – is a collaboration that extends beyond the grave, echoing the book’s own story of the living taking on and completing the unfinished work of the dead.
June 2024
The Paperback Sleuth: Ashram Assassin is by Andrew Cartmel. When a set of rare, impossible-to-find yoga books are stolen from a West London ashram, its leaders turn to Cordelia, the paperback sleuth, to recover them – a set-up that’s a little awkward as they’ve previously barred her from yoga classes for selling marijuana to their students. But what begins as a hunt for missing paperbacks soon becomes a murder investigation as those involved with the ashram can’t seem to stop dropping down dead – murdered with a whisky bottle to the head or a poisoned curry. Can Cordelia work out who the killer is and bring them to justice before they bring an end to her sleuthing for good.
August 2024
The concluding Hammer novel begins with a 21st century funeral before flashing back to summer, 1970. Six years after the events of Dig Two Graves, Hammer takes another unlikely vacation—this time on Long Island to help look after his partner Velda Sterling’s seventeen-year-old sibling, Willa. Willa must deal with the attention of two boys vying for her affection—Hammer preferring the good kid from a wealthy family over the long-haired doper with an Easy Rider vibe. When Willa gets hooked on heroin, Hamm—filled with contempt for dope dealers—goes on a rampage. He will find the man behind the drug racket and teach him what shooting up is all about. But a final resolution awaits him in the future at that funeral.... Baby, It's Murder is by Mickey Spillance and Max Allan Collins.
November 2024
Quarry's Return is by Max Allan Collins. The hitman hero of the acclaimed Cinemax series comes out of retirement when his daughter, a true-crime writer, is abducted by the subject of one of her books.
