Men of Mystery Guests of Honor: Lawrence Block and William Kent Krueger
Mysterious Galaxy is pleased to be the bookseller once again for Men of Mystery at the Irvine Marriott. This annual event offers attendees the chance to visit with and get books signed by more than 50 male mystery writers -- everything from legal thrillers to surfer P.I.’s. Featured speakers at the 2011 Celebration are William Kent Krueger (Northwest Angle) in the morning, and Lawrence Block (A Drop of the Hard Stuff and Getting Off: A Novel of Sex and Violence) in the afternoon. Meet new authors like David Bell, Todd Ritter and Darrell James, as well as returning favorites like John Lescroart, Kwei Quartey, and John Vorhaus. Attendees get to have lunch with men from all over North America, and all over the genre. For more information, visit the convention's website.
Please note -- all ebook availability refers to Google ebooks available via Mysterious Galaxy's website.
A complete collection of Matthew Scudder short fiction, from a pair of novelettes written in the mid-1970's to a brand-new story that's less than two months old.
Four years after Tom and Abby's 12-year-old daughter vanishes, she is found alive but strangely calm. When the teen refuses to testify against the man connected to her disappearance, Tom decides to investigate the traumatizing case on his own. Nothing can prepare him for what he is about to discover.
Mt. Shasta is far from the San Francisco sidewalk on which Harlan Donnally’s life nearly ended in a crossfire—
But all too close to a decades-old secret that will force him into another.
ebooks also available
The former detective swore he’d never play anyone’s postman. But a dying friend’s plea takes Donnally bearing a letter alive with tragedy toward a sister long dead—the victim of the bizarre criminality of a counterculture that had lost its way.
Stunned to learn that her killer was never prosecuted, Donnally soon finds himself in battle against a broken justice system and on a trail of evil into a dangerous borderland in which the falsely pious and the wealthy abuse the young and the poor. And though each step takes him farther down a perilous path that wrenches him between his inner demons and his mission to redeem a brother’s love, he won’t stop until he knows the truth.
For Donnally made a promise to a dead man, and he’ll keep it—or die trying.
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.
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.
After an assassination attempt on the President, an honest lawyer with strong political connections flies under the radar on a twisted path through the Secret Service, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security to uncover how security's inside ring has been compromised
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.
I was sort of hiding from two guys who either thought we were in business together or who wanted to kill me. "Sort of hiding" because I could have left town and been relatively safe, but Las Vegas, NV has so many wonderful things to see and do that I decided to go to a topless rollerskating show instead. "Sort of hiding" because I was fairly sure that the guys in question would take Door Number Two and try to shoot me, a lot.Why me? I'm T. R. Macdonald, a sort-of unemployed broker/analyst from the boutique - we handle a small number of very rich clients - firm of Fields, Smith, and Barkman. My sort-of girlfriend Kandi had asked me to go to Vegas to see if I could talk to her cousin Chet, because she thinks his adoptive father, Dr. Woodrow Shaw, may be nuts. Are you getting all this? There will be a quiz. Dr. Shaw asked me to go, too, and he offered to pay.It sounded like easy money.
So I went.
I must be nuts.
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.
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.
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.
It’s 1978 in “America’s Finest City”--San Diego, California--and one rookie cop is learning the hardest lessons the streets have to teach.
Luke Jones--a recently graduated, Shakespeare quoting literature major--is about to discover that dealing with crooks is the easiest part of his new job. For here, in a world populated by people ruled by their obsessions, Luke’s strong will and quick tongue alienate many of his senior officers and he must fight to be accepted. Although eventually labeled a hero, his success comes at great cost.
THE STICKING PLACE is the first in the Luke Jones series, which follows one cop’s career from rookie to retirement.
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.
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….