Men of Mystery Convention

SO THIS GIRL WALKS INTO A BAR... ...and when she walks out there's a man with her. She goes to bed with him, and she likes that part. Then she kills him, and she likes that even better. On her way out, she cleans out his wallet. She keeps moving, and has a new name for each change of address. She's been doing this for a while, and she's good at it. And then a chance remark gets her thinking of the men who got away, the lucky ones who survived a night with her. She starts writing down names. And now she's a girl with a mission. Picking up their trails. Hunting them down. Crossing them off her list...

Barry O'Shea is back and he's smokin'! When O'Shea joins a team of high-powered lawyers in a mega-watt arson case, the old legal beagle find him self jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Ouch! As if facing off against a polished opposition wasn't tricky enough, O'Shea isn't even sure if his own client is on his side. And that's just the first twist of the trial. If O'Shea doesn't want to get cooked in the court room, he has to rely on his gritty talents and wit like never before. Vital to the Defense sizzles with courtroom drama.

 

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Publishers Weekly Mystery fans of all ages will welcome Befeler's third humorous cozy featuring octogenarian Paul Jacobson (after 2009's Living with Your Kids Is Murder). When Paul, who suffers from short-term memory loss, awakes one morning next to an attractive woman he doesn't know in an unfamiliar garage apartment, he decides to clear his mind by going for a walk. Outside, after determining he's in Venice Beach, Calif., he discovers a dead body in a canal. Soon after, he learns the woman in the bed is his fiancée, Marion Aumiller, and it's their wedding day. When the body in the canal turns out to be a murder victim, Paul resolves to solve the crime before he and Marion depart in two weeks on their honeymoon cruise to Alaska. Aided by a daily journal he keeps and his 12-year-old granddaughter, a computer whiz, Paul once again proves a formidable sleuth. (Aug.)

AKA James Scott Bell. Bennett delivers the first title in a frighteningly funny and deliciously gory thriller series introducing Mallory Caine, a lawyer . . . and a zombie.

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Graham Brown is attending Men of Mystery. A Japanese cargo ship cruises the eastern Atlantic near the Azores- when it bursts into flames. A gang of pirates speeds to take advantage of the disaster-when their boat explodes. What is happening in this part of the world? As Kurt Austin, Joe Zavala, and the rest of the NUMA Special Assignments Team rush to investigate, they find themselves drawn into the extraordinary ambitions of an African dictator, the creation of a weapon of almost mythical power, and an unimaginably audacious plan to extort the world's major nations. The penalty for refusal? The destruction of their greatest cities. Filled with the high-stakes suspense and boundless invention unique to Cussler, Devil's Gate is one of the most thrilling novels yet from the grand master of adventure.

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From Dirt to The Cleanup, Sean Doolittle has dazzled critics and defied expectations, garnering bolder critical raves with each new novel. “Stylishly written” hailed the New York Times Book Review… “Superb” declared the Wall Street Journal…“Heart-stopping, gut-clenching, eye-opening” raved the Chicago Tribune. Now Doolittle fulfills all that promise—and more—in his latest novel, a powerhouse of suspense that will catch you off guard at every turn.…Because in Safer, a young couple moves into an idyllic little cul-de- sac—and ignites a harrowing journey into darkness as a shocking accusation is made, a family is shattered, and the mystery of a long-ago crime begins to unravel.

 

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Set in the ancient ruins of the Maya and the lush Mexican jungle, "Smoking Frog Lives!" is a thrilling murder mystery from an exciting author. Nick Michaels, an ex-P.I. turned archaeologist, finds himself chasing an elusive villain through the crumbling Mayan temples of Yaxnax, abandoned for over a thousand years. When a man dressed as Smoking Frog, a great war chief, decapitates a bound captive in a Mayan ritual, Nick finds that he'll need to draw on both his current and former professions to stop this ruthless criminal.

Brand-new stories by: T. Jefferson Parker, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Martha Lawrence, Diane Clark & Astrid Bear, Debra Ginsberg, Morgan Hunt, Ken Kuhlken, Taffy Cannon, Don Winslow, Cameron Pierce Hughes, Lisa Brackmann, Gabriel R. Barillas, Gar Anthony Haywood, and Maria Lima. San Diego is home to miles of beaches, Balboa Park, a world-famous zoo, and some of the country's most expensive home and resort real estate. Yet the city also houses a few items that aren't actively promoted by the visitor's bureau: a number of the country's most corrupt politicians, border-related crimes, terrorists, and the occasional earthquakes. A noir feast! In the 50-plus years since Raymond Chandler set Playback in Esmeralda, his name for La Jolla, the population has grown by more than a million, and crime has proliferated as well. San Diego of the past and the present offers the book's contributors a rich selection of settings, from the cross on Mount Soledad to the piers of Ocean Beach, and perpetrators and victims from the residents of its wealthiest enclaves to the inhabitants of its segregated barrios.

 

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The Feds are investigating a compound run by religious leader Silas Rule in the Appalachian region. The first undercover agent sent to the clannish community has gone missing, and Del Shannon is recruited when the FBI discovers that her father owns an abandoned property in the area. She partners with ATFE agent Frank Falconet, a New Yorker who's battling his own demons.

In 1926, when musician Tom Hickey reads in a broadside about a lynching the Los Angeles newspapers failed to report, and discovers the Negro victim was an old friend, he goes to his neighbor Leo Weiss, an LAPD detective. Leo confirms that, officially, the lynching didn’t occur. Tom has a dance orchestra to lead and a wild younger sister to raise. Yet he decides to investigate the murder. Since the lynching occurred in Echo Park, across the street from evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple, he goes there looking for clues and is greeted and watched by an usher who follows him after the service and continues to shadow him daily. The investigation earns Tom beatings, gunfire meant to dissuade him, and warnings from Leo, a speakeasy owner, and a Klansman, that he’s made formidable enemies. Among them may be infamous Police Chief Two Gun Davis, Examiner publisher and political heavyweight William Randolph Hearst, and Harry Chandler, owner of the Times, who owns more land than any man in the world. After Sister Aimee announces that on November 2, election day, she will preach a sermon entitled “The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles,” Tom deduces that the cover up may involve local politics, perhaps a ballot referendum that will decide who the city’s future belongs to: the railroads, whose plans include subways and elevated trains; or the oil, automobile, and suburban development interests, devoted to building highways. Meanwhile, Tom also discovers that the key to the murder, as is too often the case, lies close to home.

 

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A college student and an investigative reporter are drawn into a cunning world beneath the local university—a cult-like conspiracy involving faculty, students, and some well-connected people in very high places.

Publishers Weekly says, "Depression-era Hollywood forms the backdrop for this sharp-edged noir from Levinson (The Traitor in Us All). In 1933, Chris Blanchard's career as an LAPD detective comes to an abrupt end after he refuses to look the other way when his colleagues victimize a prostitute. Five years later, Blanchard undertakes "special problems" for the MGM studio. One such problem involves actress Marie MacDaniels, who comes to his apartment drunk late one night, distraught over having shot her actor husband, Day Covington, and hands over the murder weapon. When Blanchard visits the scene of the crime, he quickly finds evidence clearing MacDaniels and sends her into hiding while he looks into the matter. That crime proves to be but the tip of a very violent iceberg. Photographer to the stars Otto Rothman also ends up dead, and mobster Bugsy Siegel and some American Nazi sympathizers appear to be behind some of the untimely deaths. Blanchard, a character Chandler would recognize, deserves a series of his own. "

There’s a sweltering heat wave outside. Nearly a year after Pittsburgh psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi helped unravel a baffling murder, he finds himself drawn into another case. When a daring bank robbery goes horribly wrong, resulting in the deaths of all the hostages except one, Rinaldi is called in to question Treva Williams, the traumatized young woman who survived. However, what seemed a simple robbery soon explodes into a series of events that plunge the investigating officers, Sgt. Harry Polk and Det. Eleanor Lowrey—as well as Rinaldi himself—into a vortex of mistaken identity and kidnapping. Meanwhile, thrown together by the demands of the case, Rinaldi and Eleanor deal with the growing attraction between them. Then there’s the gubernatorial campaign of Rinaldi’s former romantic rival, District Attorney Leland Sinclair. Plot twists multiply as a frenzy of accusations and political maneuvering gathers steam.

 

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In the slums of Accra, Ghana’s fast-moving, cosmopolitan capital, teenagers are turning up dead. Inspector Darko Dawson has seen many crimes, but this latest string of murders—in which all the young victims bear a chilling signature—is the most unsettling of his career. Are these heinous acts a form of ritual killing or the work of a lone, cold-blooded monster? With time running out, Dawson embarks on a harrowing journey through the city’s underbelly and confronts the brutal world of the urban poor, where street children are forced to fight for their very survival—and a cunning killer seems just out of reach.

 

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In a desert town on the road between L.A. and Vegas, all hell has broken loose . . . In a bedroom community populated by good cops and bad cops, a retired police officer and his wife have been brutally tortured and slain. A "wildcase" with no apparent rhyme or reason, it has caught the attention of the FBI . . . and Hollywood billionaire, ex-Delta Force operative Rail Black, who called the slaughtered pair his friends. With his frighteningly efficient skills and more money than he could ever spend, Rail believes in helping people he cares about—even if it means clashing with the government's enforcers. But this wildcase has toxic tendrils rooted in a distant past, snaking through a shady megachurch, through Sin City, and into shadowy places halfway around the globe. And the precious blood already spilled is nothing compared to the deluge to come—with Rail's own added to the mix if he gets too close.

 

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Attorney Bill Lawrence's hitman client unloads a bombshell that will change history: evidence of a murder he committed on September 11, 2001. After finding the explosive documents, Bill immediately enters his family into the witness protection program, much to the dismay of his 24-year-old daughter, Claudia, who's not thrilled about being uprooted from her job and her boyfriend. But the next morning her parents are killed by a car bomb, the hitman is murdered in his cell, and Claudia is accused of her parents' murder. She and her 12-year-old brother, Adam, become fugitives, running from the police and the rogue FBI agents who want them dead. Their only hope of survival is to find the evidence her father possessed, and she and Adam are led on a cross-country quest that eventually lands them on a Chesapeake Bay estate. There, in an ultra-tense climax, Claudia finally deciphers the ugly secret behind 9/11. Will she live to tell about it?

True Tales from Tinseltown's Past--from the sleepy little town's invasion in 1910 to modern-day tales of murder and mayhem, "It Happened in Hollywood" recounts in thirty short episodes the behind-the-scenes events that shaped Tinseltown.

LAPD Robbery-Homicide Detective Hayden Glass has always had trouble controlling his urges. No longer trolling the streets looking for working girls, he has a new obsession--the Internet. Infatuated with a woman he finds on a website, Hayden Glass's sex addiction drags him to San Francisco and into a web of corruption and crime. Glass’s search for this woman leads him to a massive sex slave trade, run by the Russian mafia and protected by a group of powerful and corrupt San Francisco cops. Glass gets co-opted by the FBI to aid in their investigation...but his presence is doing much more harm than good.

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A child dies on the border between California and Mexico. This is nothing new: immigrants die crossing the border all the time, escaping from poverty and violence in Latin America. They bake in the desert. But this death is different. Someone has taken body parts from the child. FBI Agent Romilia Chacón, a Salvadoran American, follows this case into a world that swallows her with its horror, a world that exists alongside ours, where children are bought and sold like cattle and shipped to men all across the country. The dealers in this blackest of markets have no moral barometer, only a lust for cash. And one among them has taken murder to a level beyond serial killing. Romilia comes to this case already broken: the man she loved and yet had to hunt—drug runner Tekún Umán, a regular on the FBI’s Most Wanted List—is gone. Romilia has two friends, her partner Nancy Pearl—who lives a double life between the Feds and the cartels—and a bottle of booze. Romilia’s mother is on her back to get sober; her son drifts further and further away. And the killer is taking away pieces of Romilia’s life, day by day.

In 1592, Prague is a relatively safe refuge for Jews who live within the gated walls of its ghetto. But the peace is threatened when a young Christian girl is found with her throat slashed in a Jewish shop on the eve of Passover. Charged with blood libel, the shopkeeper and his family are arrested, and all that stands in the way of a rabid Christian mob is a clever Talmudic scholar, newly arrived from Poland, named Benyamin Ben-Akiva. Granted just three days to bring the true killer to justice—hampered by rabbinic law, with no allies or connections, and only his wits, knowledge, and faith to guide him—Benyamin sets off on a desperate search for answers. Following a twisting trail from the streets to the shul, from the forbidden back rooms of a ghetto brothel to the emperor Rudolf II's lavish palace, he will dare the impossible—and commit the unthinkable—to save the Jews of Prague . . . and himself.

 

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Natalie Lindstrom has finally left the underworld behind for a new career in the art world. But there’s one world she can’t escape: the Other world of the dead. As a former Violet, an elite crime-fighter with the power to channel murder victims, Natalie is now using her paranormal gift to summon the spirits of legendary painters. But she’s about to discover how far some people will go to keep their hold on her–and others like her…. Evan Markham, her ex-lover-turned-Violet-Killer, has escaped from prison. And he’s been made an offer he can’t refuse: Natalie. But first he must help contact a deceased geneticist whose most intriguing experiment was brutally interrupted: an attempt to manufacture Violets. To protect her young daughter and herself, Natalie must search for the scientist’s only living test subject–a handsome but tortured artist to whom she is dangerously attracted. For he is caught in the grip of two opposing forces, one that wants his survival, another that wants him–and anyone connected with him–destroyed….

 

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