Showing results for "Stories" in Modern Detectives

When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.

‘DCI Matilda Darke is the perfect heroine’ Elly Griffiths A short story and prequel featuring DCI Matilda Darke, star of Michael Wood’s darkly compelling crime series. Perfect for fans of Stuart MacBride, Mark Billingham and Val McDermid. It’s Christmas in Sheffield. But not everyone is...

Containing over 47 stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train - a bullet couldn't pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes.

Reacher finds himself caught in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between US Military Intelligence and the KGB in this thrilling tale of espionage …

From the No. 1 bestselling author of THE MISSING AND THE DEAD comes the short novel: 22 DEAD LITTLE BODIES, plus two short stories: STRAMASH and DI STEEL'S BAD HEIR DAY, and a novella: THE 45% HANGOVER, all featuring his most popular characters – DS Logan McRae and DCI Roberta Steel. They say...

Introducing Punk Rock Private Eye, Nick Paras. He has to work on Christmas. He's got a new client, but taking care of the case isn't what he expected it to be, and it turns out he isn't who he expected to be.

A collection of interlinked tales of crime and retribution laced with dark humour, set around the festive season – from the No. 1 bestseller Stuart MacBride On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… Twelve days, twelve stories. Meet Fat Billy Partridge, possibly the worst...

Matthew Scudder investigates the brutal murder of a woman known as the “bag lady.” A seemingly homeless woman, she turns out to have distributed her substantial wealth in a complex will naming random strangers. Where did the money come from? Why was she living in such reduced circumstances? And why in the world did she choose these beneficiaries—the owner of a local newspaper stand, a neighbor she rarely spoke to, the detective himself—when her real friends and acquaintances got nothing at all? And how is all this linked to her murder?

Lawrence Block's 17 Matthew Scudder novels have won the hearts of readers throughout the world - along with a bevy of awards including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe (Germany), and the Maltese Falcon (Japan). But Scudder has starred in short fiction as well, and it's all here, from a pair of late-'70s novelettes ("Out the Window" and "A Candle for the Bag Lady") through "By the Dawn's Early Light" (Edgar) and "The Merciful Angel of Death" (Shamus), all the way to "One Last Night at Grogan's", a moving and elegiac story never before published.

Matthew Scudder, a down-but-not-out-detective, is shocked by the apparent suicide of Paula, a waitress at Armstrong’s, one of Scudder’s hangouts. When Paula’s sister shows up and asks Matt to investigate what she believes to be a murder, Scudder agrees to take on the case. A number of clues don’t add up to suicide, and Scudder’s investigation leads him to the dark corners of Paula’s world.

A chilling short story taking us back to DI Sean Corrigan’s days as a newly minted detective from Luke Delaney, ex-Met detective and author of Cold Killing. Perfect for fans of Mark Billingham, Peter James and Stuart MacBride. 1993. The Parkside Rapist has been terrorising the women of South...

Matthew Scudder reminisces of his uniformed days and of the night he bent the law to help some "friends of a friend." When a friendly game of poker turns deadly, Scudder is called upon to solve the murder…and hide the body.

The DI Sean Corrigan Short Story Collection includes four short stories from Luke Delaney’s terrifyingly authentic DI Sean Corrigan series: REDEMPTION OF THE DEAD, THE NETWORK, THE RAIN KILLER and AN IMPERFECT KILLING. REDEMPTION OF THE DEAD 1993. The Parkside Rapist has been terrorising the...

Matthew Scudder is called to a hospice center for AIDS patients to investigate what the press is dubbing as "Mercy Killings".

First story in a collection of interlinked tales of crime and retribution laced with dark humour, set around the festive season Billy Partridge wasn’t really cut out to be a cat burglar, but it was ‘do the job, or come up with thirteen grand by Thursday, or have both legs shattered’. ‘Do...

Matthew Scudder gets hired by a fellow bar patron to prove his innocence. Salesman Tommy Tillary is a 45-year-old philanderer with a Manhattan girlfriend and a Brooklyn wife. So when Tommy becomes a suspect in the murder of his wife, it's up to Matt to find the real killer.

Dashiell Hammett is best known as both pioneer and master of American hard-boiled detective fiction, but these dozen and a half stories both affirm that reputation and present him in a different light. Along with the full-length treatments On the Make and The Kiss-Off, this collection includes never before and rarely published stories that explore failed romance, courage in the face of uncertainty, hypocrisy, and crass opportunism.

Clark’s investigation begins with cocaine and leads to cold-blooded murder - the discovery of one, and then another, headless corpse. Who is behind the slaughter? Are the killings tied to the drug traffic? Or is a deeper, darker, and even more sinister conspiracy unfolding in the carnival?

Tex Larimee is a grizzled Arizona sheriff who’s leaving the deserts of Cactus County behind, blazing a trail east to mix it up with The Slickers in the canyons of Manhattan. Tex’s welcome to New York is a rude one. Robbed of his cash, gun and badge, he’s locked in a room in back of a run-down bar. Breaking out of the bar, he goes looking for his best friend...only to find him dead, his throat cut. And the cops accuse Tex of committing the murder.

Kurt Reid may be innocent of the murder he's charged with (and of grand larceny, for that matter), but he's got no time to be thrown in jail and defend himself. Instead, Reid flees to pre-Communist China and Shanghai, the exotic city of mystery and death. Reid takes refuge in a tea house where he meets a Russian woman, Varinka Savischna, whom he manages to rescue from certain death. As beautiful as she is smart, she recruits him in her crusade against Chinese intelligence services.