Dodgers

Wade disappeared on us when I was six, and I never saw him again until I turned twelve, after Mom was buried. She always said he was a loser, even if he was our dad, but it turns out he was much more than that. He was also a thief. Like he was on the day he stole me and my little sister.

From the creator of the hit HBO series True Detective comes a powerful, gleaming-dark thriller rich with Southern atmosphere. Roy Cady is by his own admission 'a bad man'. With a snow flurry of cancer in his lungs and no one to live for, he's a walking time-bomb of violence. Following a fling with his boss' lover, he's sent on a routine assignment he knows is a death trap. Yet after a smoking spasm of violence, Roy's would-be killers are mostly dead and he is mostly alive.

For 11 years the clock has been ticking for Russell Gaines while he's sat in Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta. His time now up, and believing his debt has been paid, he returns home only to discover that revenge lives and breathes all around.

Captain Sam Wyndham, former Scotland Yard detective, is a new arrival to Calcutta. Desperately seeking a fresh start after his experiences during the Great War, Wyndham has been recruited to head up a new post in the police force. But with barely a moment to acclimatise to his new life or to deal with the ghosts which still haunt him, Wyndham is caught up in a murder investigation that will take him into the dark underbelly of the British Raj.

Ancient Rome matters. Its history of empire, conquest, cruelty and excess is something against which we still judge ourselves. Its myths and stories - from Romulus and Remus to the rape of Lucretia - still strike a chord with us. And its debates about citizenship, security and the rights of the individual still influence our own debates on civil liberty today. SPQR is a new look at Roman history from one of the world's foremost classicists.

It had been raining for weeks. Maybe months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn't rained, when the storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew and the clouds were white and sunshine glistened across the drenched land. Following years of catastrophic hurricanes, the Gulf Coast - stretching from the Florida panhandle to the western Louisiana border - has been brought to its knees. The region is so punished and depleted that the government has drawn a new boundary ninety miles north of the coastline.

Golden Globe-winning actor Michael C. Hall ( Six Feet Under) performs Truman Capote's masterstroke about a young writer's charmed fascination with his unorthodox neighbor, the "American geisha" Holly Golightly. Holly - a World War II-era society girl in her late teens - survives via socialization, attending parties and restaurants with men from the wealthy upper class who also provide her with money and expensive gifts. Over the course of the novella, the seemingly shallow Holly slowly opens up to the curious protagonist.

A small-time hood tries to escape the family business in this powerful story of crime and drug abuse in rural America. The town of Sewardville, Kentucky, teeters on the edge of a violent abyss, overrun with methamphetamine and prescription drug abuse. The Slone family controls everything. Patriarch Walt Slone is the town's mayor and head of one of the largest crime syndicates in the eastern United States.

Detective sergeant Denny Malone leads an elite unit to fight gangs, drugs and guns in New York. For 18 years he's been on the front lines, doing whatever it takes to survive in a city built by ambition and corruption, where no one is clean. What only a few know is that Denny Malone himself is dirty: he and his partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash. Now he's caught in a trap and being squeezed by the Feds, and he must walk a thin line of betrayal, while the city teeters on the brink of a racial conflagration that could destroy them all.

Japan 1951. After spending the last three years in solitary confinement for the murder of his mentor, Nicholai Hel is offered the chance of freedom - but at a price. Overseen by his American spymaster and the beautiful and mysterious Solange, he must travel to China and assassinate the Soviet Union's commissioner. In a landscape primed for war this is a suicide mission he has no choice but to accept. From the glittering corruption of Beijing to the darkest shadows of the Vietnam jungle, his mission will sweep him through a world of chaos, violence and betrayal.

Gilman James comes home from Iraq - the last of three childhood friends to return. His brothers-in-arms are mere shadows of their former selves - Gil, unmarked, determines to take care of them. But how far should a man go for the people he loves? Stepping across the line between right and wrong, Gil finds himself stranded in the Texan desert - as a bank heist he's planned goes horribly wrong. Pursued into the badlands by US Marshal John Whicher, a moment of violent reckoning is set in train.

Crows (Community Relations Officers) have it easy handling "the sissie beat": Hollywood's domestic disputes, over-excited paparazzi, and chronic complainers. At least, that's the way it seems. But in Hollywood - where Mickey Mouse is a crack addict and Marilyn Monroe is a man - things are rarely what they seem.

Outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Batman has assaulted Spider-Man. Marilyn Monroe reported the crime and three Elvises witnessed it. It's business as usual for the cops out of Hollywood Station. But while they deal with the costumed crack-heads, prostitutes, purse snatchers, and ordinary lunatics that haunt the boulevards, in the streets behind the lights and crowds, the real Los Angeles simmers, never far from boiling point.

The Fighter is a brilliant novel set against the dark and desolate backdrop of the Mississippi Delta, where Jack the Jaw, a washed-up bare-knuckle fighter, battles against decades of booze and drug abuse as he returns home to try to save all he has lost. The acres of fertile soil, the 200-year-old house, all gone. And so is the woman who gave it to him, the foster mother who now rests in hospice care, her mind eroded by dementia, the family legacy she entrusted to Jack now owned by banks and strangers.

Southern fables usually go the other way around. A white woman is killed or harmed in some way, real or imagined, and then, like the moon follows the sun, a black man ends up dead. But when it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules - a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger working the backwoods towns of Highway 59, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about his home state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.