Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> Mystery & Detective - Hard-Boiled

The desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness and only Detective Lew Archer can make sense of a killer who makes murder a work of art.

Finding a purloined portrait of a leggy blonde was supposed to be an easy paycheck for Archer, but that was before the bodies began piling up. Suddenly, Archer find himself smack in the middle of a decades-long mystery of a brilliant artist who walked into the desert and simply disappeared. He left behind a bevy of muses, molls, dolls, and dames-each one scrambling for what they thought was rightfully theirs.

Artie Cohen is a good-looking New York City cop with a taste for women and jazz and no intention of looking back to the past he left behind twenty-five years earlier in Moscow. In Red Hot Blues, he is faced with a case that leaves him no choice but to confront that past. When a former KGB general is shot dead on live TV, Artie is compelled to take the case; the general was a friend of his father's. Artie doesn't have to go far until he is led into the heart of the Brighton Beach mafia, where the most lethal weapon on the street is rumored to be an elusive substance known as Red Mercury -...

Sometimes, Philadelphia Police Detective Kevin Lynch feels like he has spent his whole life trying to put his past firmly behind him. But a frantic call for help from a childhood friend whose child has gone missing changes all that. Now, Lynch must summon the courage to return to his childhood home, the infamous projects known as The Bridge. As the case unfolds and the search for Kenya, the missing girl, intensifies, the secrets guarded by her family and friends begin to emerge. These hidden truths are more sinister and malevolent than Lynch could ever imagine. Once again, The Bridge...

The Governor: Gardner "Rebound" Rothman---married, family values New Jersey Republican with White House fantasies, a terrible secret, and a controversial position on young interns: he's for 'em
The Tart: Simone Lava, the voluptuous Miss Little Egg Harbor Township. Rebound keeps her hidden away in Atlantic City's seedy Celebrity Motel where she practices waving like a First Lady---a title she's been promised, if she'll just lay low during election season.
The Fixer: Chief Willie Thundercloud, former pro wrestler who runs the Jersey Shore's most ruthless damage...

It's a typical cold November night and Detective Sergeant Dennis Milne, a very atypical policeman, waits in the Traveller's Rest Hotel parking lot for the arrival of three men. Cynical and jaded, Milne earns money on the side by doing what he does best: punishing the bad guys. But this time he's been duped. Instead of blowing away drug dealers, he kills three innocent people, their deaths starting an investigation that sees him and his conscience heading for trouble.

Less than twelve hours later, Milne is out on the streets again. Eighteen-year-old Miriam Fox has been found dead by...

Still stinging from his unceremonious ouster from the Garda Siochana--The Guards, Ireland's police force--and staring at the world through the smoky bottom of his beer mug, Jack Taylor is stuck in Galway with nothing to look forward to. In his sober moments Jack aspires to become Ireland's best private investigator, not to mention its first--Irish history, full of betrayal and espionage, discourages any profession so closely related to informing. But in truth Jack is teetering on the brink of his life's sharpest edges, his memories of the past cutting deep into his soul and his prospects...

Set in San Francisco before the high-tech markets went bust, The Big Boom features Dante Mancuso, an obsessive private investigator who works the streets of his hometown where he's known by his nose and his nickname: The Pelican.

Settling in and hoping to settle down, his peace is shattered when an old North Beach family asks him to find their daughter---one of Dante's former sweethearts. Though the case alienates his longtime lover Marilyn Visconte, Dante has no choice but to plunge into the shadows of the dot-com revolution.

A tightrope of a novel and a...

The South East London police squad are down and out: Detective Sergeant Brant is in hot water for assaulting a police shrink, Chief Inspector Roberts' wife has died in a horrific car accident, and WPC Falls is still figuring out how to navigate her job as a black female investigator in the notorious unit. When a serial killer takes his show on the road, things get worse for all three. Nicknamed "The Blitz" by the rabid London media, the killer is aiming for tabloid immortality by killing cops in different beats around the city.

Blitz represents Ken Bruen at his edgy, lethal,...

For the Southeast London police squad, it's rough, tough, dirty business as usual. The Vixen, the most sensuous, crazed female serial killer ever, is masterminding a series of lethal explosions. She is unpredictable, wild, angry--and the cops don't even know she exists.

Meanwhile, Inspector Roberts is helpless to stop the explosions and his subordinates aren't doing much better. Brant is consumed with an even-bigger-than-usual mean streak, and fast-rising Porter Nash finds himself facing serious health problems--everything to do with needles. PC MacDonald is determined to soldier on,...

When Jack Taylor blew town at the end of The Guards his alcoholism was a distant memory and sober dreams of a new life in London were shining in his eyes. In the opening pages of The Killing of the Tinkers, Jack's back in Galway a year later with a new leather jacket on his back, a pack of smokes in his pocket, a few grams of coke in his waistband, and a pint of Guinness on his mind. So much for new beginnings.

Before long he's sunk into his old patterns, lifting his head from the bar only every few days, appraising his surroundings for mere minutes and then descending...

Somewhere in the teeming heart of London is a man on a lethal mission. His cause: a long-overdue lesson on the importance of manners. When a man gives a public tongue-lashing to a misbehaving child, or a parking lot attendant is rude to a series of customers, the "Manners Killer" makes sure that the next thing either sees is the beginning of his own grisly end.

When he starts mailing letters to the Southeast London police squad, he'll soon find out just how bad a man's manners can get. The Southeast is dominated by the perpetual sneer of one Inspector Brant, and while he might or...

Over the many years that Inspector Brant has been bringing his own patented brand of policing to the streets of southeast London, the brilliant but tough cop has made a few enemies. So when a crazed gunman, hired by persons unknown, pumps a magazine full of bullets into Brant in a local pub, leaving him in grasping at life (but ornery as ever), his colleagues on the squad are left wondering how to react.

Brant's old partner Inspector Roberts, the man who may know him best, finds himself wondering why someone didn't shoot the hateful detective years ago. In Ken Bruen's...

Meet Lennon, a mute Irish getaway driver who has fallen in with the wrong heist team on the wrong day at the wrong bank. Betrayed, his money stolen and his battered carcass left for dead, Lennon is on a one-way mission to find out who is responsible--and to get back his loot. But the robbery has sent a violent ripple effect through the streets of Philadelphia. And now a dirty cop, the Russian and Italian mobs, the mayor's hired gun, and a keyboard player in a college rock band maneuver for position as this adrenaline-fueled novel twists and turns its way toward its explosive...

Jack Taylor is walking the delicate edge of a sobriety he doesn't trust when his phone rings. He's in debt to a Galway tough named Bill Cassell, what the locals call a "hard man." Bill did Jack a big favor a while back; the trouble is, he never lets a favor go unreturned.

Jack is amazed when Cassell simply asks him to track down a woman, now either dead or very old, who long ago helped his mother escape from the notorious Magdalen laundry, where young wayward girls were imprisoned and abused. Jack doesn't like the odds of finding the woman, but counts himself lucky that the task is...

The Murder Exchange

When ex-mercenary Max Iversson agreed to provide security for nightclub owner Roy Fowler, he never expected a bloodbath. Three men have been shot, the briefcase Iversson was guarding is empty...and now he wants to know why. So begins a dangerous hunt for answers that will take him into direct conflict with Detective Sergeant John Gallan, who is investigating the mysterious death of one of Fowler's doormen, and toward a confrontation that neither is likely to escape unscathed.

The Business of Dying

Cynical and jaded, Detective Sergeant...

Seems impossible, but Jack Taylor is sober---off booze, pills, powder, and nearly off cigarettes, too. The main reason he's been able to keep clean: his dealer's in jail, which leaves Jack without a source. When that dealer calls him to Dublin and asks a favor in the soiled, sordid visiting room of Mountjoy Prison, Jack wants to tell him to take a flying leap. But he doesn't, can't, because the dealer's sister is dead, and the guards have called it "death by misadventure."

The dealer knows that can't be true and begs Jack to have a look, check around, see what he can find out. It's...

The night before a big meeting, Jack Eisley is sitting in an airport bar in Philadelphia, chatting up a pretty young blonde. Sure, Jack has a wife and daughter at home, but this is just a little harmless flirting. Harmless, that is, until the blonde leans forward and says, "I poisoned your drink."

She tells Jack that unless she can keep someone within ten feet of her at all times, she'll die. And if he wants the antidote, he'll have to take her back to his hotel room and promise to stay by her side.

Jack thinks: psycho. But as the violent night wears on, and he encounters a...

Ireland, awash with cash and greed, no longer turns to the church for solace or comfort. But the decapitation of Father Joyce in a Galway confessional horrifies even the most jaded citizen.
Jack Taylor, devastated by the recent trauma of personal loss, has always believed himself to be beyond salvation. But a new job offers a fresh start, and an unexpected partnership provides hope that his one desperate vision--of family--might yet be fulfilled.
An eerie mix of exorcism, a predatory stalker, and unlikely attraction conspires to lure him into a murderous web of dark conspiracies. The...

Novelist and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Richard Price's bestselling second novel offers "an unforgettable picture of inner-city decay and despair" (USA Today)

At once an intense mystery and a revealing study of two men, a veteran homicide detective and an innercity crack dealer, on opposite sides of an endless war. Clockers is "powerful . . . harrowing . . . remarkable" (The New York Times Book Review).