'It's fascinating to see some of my favourite crime novelists coming together to create a taut, tense thriller; each chapter stands alone as a powerful story, yet they also combine seamlessly into a great read. Genuinely gripping.' – Harlan Coben***With each crime writer picking up the story in their usual locale, each of the authors tell a gripping story of murder, betrayal and intrigue. Running through each story is a charm bracelet which brings bad luck wherever it's found. Set in locations ranging from nineteenth-century Georgia to wartime Leeds, the book features stories from contributors such as Peter Robinson (writing about 1940s Leeds), Fidelis Morgan, Lynda La Plante (1970s Britain), Val McDermid (1980s Scotland) and Mark Billingham tackling contemporary London.

Hay preguntas que sólo los muertos podrían responder…En 1975, dos hermanas, de once y quince años, desaparecieron en un centro comercial. Nunca fueron encontradas, y cientos de preguntas quedaron sin respuesta: ¿cómo pudieron secuestrar a dos niñas?, ¿quién o qué consiguió atraerlas fuera del centro sin dejar rastro? Treinta años después, una extraña mujer que se ha visto envuelta en un accidente de tráfico asegura ser una de las niñas. Pero su confesión y las posteriores evasivas con que responde a los investigadores sólo profundizan el misterio. ¿Dónde ha estado todos estos años?

Hay preguntas que sólo los muertos podrían responder…En 1975, dos hermanas, de once y quince años, desaparecieron en un centro comercial. Nunca fueron encontradas, y cientos de preguntas quedaron sin respuesta: ¿cómo pudieron secuestrar a dos niñas?, ¿quién o qué consiguió atraerlas fuera del centro sin dejar rastro? Treinta años después, una extraña mujer que se ha visto envuelta en un accidente de tráfico asegura ser una de las niñas. Pero su confesión y las posteriores evasivas con que responde a los investigadores sólo profundizan el misterio. ¿Dónde ha estado todos estos años?

Las mujeres más peligrosas son aquellas que resultan irresistibles. ¿Qué hace peligrosa a una mujer? Su gran belleza, su encanto, su inteligencia, la manera en que se aparta el cabello de los ojos, o el modo de reírse. Puede tener conciencia absoluta de su poder, o desconocerlo por completo. Utilizarlo comoa rma o protegerse detrás de él. La intención y el propósito no aumentan ni disminuyen el poder, y ése es mayor peligro de todos los que son seducidos y sometidos por él.

Brand-new stories by: Ace Atkins, Laura Lippman, Patty Friedmann, Barbara Hambly, Tim McLoughlin, Olympia Vernon, David Fulmer, Jervey Tervalon, James Nolan, Kalamu ya Salaam, Maureen Tan, Thomas Adcock, Jeri Cain Rossi, Christine Wiltz, Greg Herren, Julie Smith, Eric Overmyer, and Ted O’Brien.[A portion of the profits from New Orleans Noir will be donated to Katrina KARES, a hurricane relief program sponsored by the New Orleans Institute that awards grants to writers affected by the hurricane.]New Orleans is a third world country in itself, a Latin, African, European (and often amoral) culture trapped in a Puritan nation. It’s everyone’s seamy underside, the city where respectable citizens go to get drunk, puke in the gutter, dance on tabletops, and go home with strangers, all without guilt. It’s the metropolitan equivalent of eating standing up — if it happened in New Orleans, it doesn’t count.The city was always the home of the lovable rogue, the poison magnolia, the bent politico, the sociopathic street thug, and, especially, the heartless con artist — but in post-Katrina times it struggles against... well, the same old problems, just writ large and with a new breed of carpetbagger thrown in. Combine all that with a brilliant literary tradition and you have New Orleans Noir, a sparkling collection of tales exploring the city’s wasted, gutted neighborhoods, its outwardly gleaming “sliver by the river,” its still-raunchy French Quarter, and other hoods so far from the Quarter they might as well be on another continent. It also looks back into the past, from that recent innocent time known in contemporary New Orleans as “pre-K,” to the mid-nineteenth century, the other time the city was mostly swampland.

For Tess Monaghan, the unsolved murder of a young federal prosecutor is nothing more than a theoretical problem, one of several cases to be deconstructed in her new gig as a consultant to the local newspaper. But it becomes all too tangible when her boyfriend brings home a young street kid who doesn't even realize he holds an important key to the man’s death. Tess agrees to protect the boy’s identity no matter what, especially when one of his friends is killed in what appears to be a case of mistaken identity. But with federal agents determined to learn the boy’s name at any cost, Tess finds out just how far even official authorities will go to get what they want. Soon she’s facing felony charges – and her boyfriend, Crow, has gone into hiding with his young protégé, so Tess can’t deliver the kid to investigators even if she wants to. Time and time again Tess is reminded of her father’s old joke, the one about the most terrifying sentence in the English language: “We're from the government – and we're here to help.”

This volume brings together the genre’s finest from the past year. With stories from mystery veterans and newly discovered talents, this thrilling collection is sure to appeal to crime fiction fans of all tastes.

The best-selling author Carl Hiaasen takes the reins for the eleventh edition of this series, featuring twenty of the past year’s most distinguished tales of mystery, crime, and suspense.Laura Lippman introduces us to a suburban soccer mom who moonlights as a call girl and who has a fateful encounter with a former client at her son’s soccer game. Ridley Pearson traces a famous author of horror tales who becomes trapped in a real one after his wife vanishes while jogging. Joyce Carol Oates travels to a New Jersey racetrack where the animals that break down are of the two-legged type. Lawrence Block tells the story of Keller, a hitman for hire who happens to live in Greenwich Village, loves spicy food, and collects stamps as a hobby. And Scott Wolven plunges us into the world of an ex-con who takes a job at a private and very illegal Nevada racetrack where each day millions are won and lost. Mostly lost.As Carl Hiaasen notes in his introduction, “The stories in this collection would do honor to any anthology of short literature. More than transcending the genre of crime, they blow away its nebulous boundaries.” The Best American Mystery Stories 2007 is a powerful collection certain to delight mystery aficionados and all lovers of great fiction.

Private Investigator Tess Monaghan knows all about the darker side of human nature, not least from her days as a reporter. But she never expected to be on the receiving end of a court sentence to attend six month's counselling for Anger Management. Tess starts the counselling but then her attention turns to a series of unsolved homicides. They appear to be overlooked cases of domestic violence. But the more Tess investigates, the more she is convinced that there is just one culprit. The Maryland State Police are sure that the serial killer Tess is now looking for is dead. So he can't be a threat. Can he? But he is very much alive and has found another victim to stalk: Tess.

One of the most acclaimed novelists in America today, Laura Lippman has greatly expanded the boundaries of mystery fiction and psychological suspense with her Tess Monaghan p.i. series and her New York Times bestselling standalone novels (What the Dead Know, Life Sentences, I'd Know You Anywhere, etc.). With The Most Dangerous Thing, the multiple award winning author – recipient of the Anthony, Edgar®, Shamus, and Agatha Awards, to name but a few – once again demonstrates how storytelling is done to perfection. Set once again in the well-wrought environs of Lippman's beloved Baltimore, it is the shadowy tale of a group of onetime friends forced to confront a dark past they've each tried to bury following the death of one of their number. Rich in the compassion and insight into flawed human nature that has become a Lippman trademark while telling an absolutely gripping story, The Most Dangerous Thing will not be confined by genre restrictions, reaching out instead to captive a wide, diverse audience, from Harlan Coben and Kate Atkinson fans to readers of Jodi Picoult and Kathryn Stockett.

Tess Monaghan’s life is back on course. She is beginning to make a name for herself as a PI, she’s even banking good money. And then her father asks her a favour: to investigate the death in prison of a friend’s brother convicted of killing an unidentified girl, otherwise known as “Jane Doe”. Tess’s search leads her to “the Sugar House”, a brutal institution where she discovers Jane Doe’s real identity. And then Tess’s father begs her to drop the case… It is not until her parent’s house is set on fire and a body pulled from the wreckage, that she realises that her life may have taken a very wrong turning indeed – one from which there is no going back…

Laura Lippman is one of the most acclaimed authors of crime fiction writing today, the winner of every major award the genre has to offer. Now she dazzles once again with a riveting stand-alone novel that takes on the secret – and not-so-secret – lives of teenage girls, illuminating a dark tragedy with startling clarity and unique empathy. To the Power of Three The three girls have been inseparable best friends since the third grade – Josie, the athletic one; Perri, the brilliant, acerbic drama queen; and Kat, the beauty, who also has brains, grace, and a heart open to all around her. But their last day of high school becomes their final day together after one of them brings a gun to school to resolve a mysterious feud. When the police arrive, they discover two wounded girls, one so critically that she is not expected to recover. The third girl is dead, killed instantly by a shot to the heart. What transpired that morning at Glendale High rocks the foundation of an affluent community in Baltimore ’s distant suburbs, a place that has barely recovered from an earlier, more comprehensible tragedy. For the shell-shocked parents, teachers, administrators, and students, healing must begin with answers to the usual questions – but only if the answers are safe ones, answers that will lead back to one girl and one family and absolve everyone else. For Homicide Sgt. Harold Lenhardt, this case is a mystery with more twists than these grief-stricken suburbanites are willing to acknowledge – and the sole lucid survivor, a girl with a teenager’s uncanny knack for stonewalling, strikes him as being less than honest. What is she concealing? Is she trying to protect herself or someone else? Even the simplest secrets can kill – and kill again if no one is willing to confront them. Breathtaking in its emotional depth, powerful, provocative, and consistently surprising, Laura Lippman’s To the Power of Three carries the crime novel into richer, more fertile territory. It is the crowning achievement to date in an already exemplary literary career.

The best USA-based stories in the Akashic noir series, compiled into one volume and edited by Johnny Temple!

Thirty years ago two sisters disappeared from a shopping mall. Their bodies were never found and those familiar with the case have always been tortured by these questions: How do you kidnap two girls? Who – or what – could have lured the two sisters away from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness? Now a clearly disoriented woman involved in a rush-hour hit-and-run claims to be the younger of the long-gone Bethany sisters. But her involuntary admission and subsequent attempt to stonewall investigators only deepens the mystery. Where has she been? Why has she waited so long to come forward? Could her abductor truly be a beloved Baltimore cop? There isn't a shred of evidence to support her story, and every lead she gives the police seems to be another dead end – a dying, incoherent man, a razed house, a missing grave, and a family that disintegrated long ago, torn apart not only by the crime but by the fissures the tragedy revealed in what appeared to be the perfect household. In a story that moves back and forth across the decades, there is only one person who dares to be skeptical of a woman who wants to claim the identity of one Bethany sister without revealing the fate of the other. Will he be able to discover the truth?

Thirty years ago two sisters disappeared from a shopping mall. Their bodies were never found and those familiar with the case have always been tortured by these questions: How do you kidnap two girls? Who – or what – could have lured the two sisters away from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness? Now a clearly disoriented woman involved in a rush-hour hit-and-run claims to be the younger of the long-gone Bethany sisters. But her involuntary admission and subsequent attempt to stonewall investigators only deepens the mystery. Where has she been? Why has she waited so long to come forward? Could her abductor truly be a beloved Baltimore cop? There isn't a shred of evidence to support her story, and every lead she gives the police seems to be another dead end – a dying, incoherent man, a razed house, a missing grave, and a family that disintegrated long ago, torn apart not only by the crime but by the fissures the tragedy revealed in what appeared to be the perfect household. In a story that moves back and forth across the decades, there is only one person who dares to be skeptical of a woman who wants to claim the identity of one Bethany sister without revealing the fate of the other. Will he be able to discover the truth?