Laguna Beach, California, 1968.

The Age of Aquarius is in full swing. Timothy Leary is a rock star. LSD is God. Folks from all over are flocking to Laguna, seeking peace, love, and enlightenment.

Sixteen-year-old Matt Anthony is just trying to get by. His mom’s a stoner, his deadbeat dad is a no-show, his brother’s fighting in Nam... and his big sister, Jazz, has just gone missing. The cops figure she’s just another runaway hippie chick, enjoying a summer of love, but Matt doesn’t believe it. Not after another missing girl turns up dead on the beach.

In a town where the cops don’t trust the hippies and the hippies don’t trust the cops, uncovering what’s really happened to Jazz is going to force Matt to grow up fast. If it’s not already too late.

Fresh out of college, a young man is hired by a high-end travel agency. His fears that he might be in over his head prove to be well-founded when he is dispatched to a potential new destination, Playa Amazonia. Twenty hours of traveling leads him to a luxurious hotel, the world's most beautiful beach — and an encounter with a highly unusual invasive species.

The Carson dynasty rules the ski-resort town of Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. Founded by patriarch Adam, the town is the site of the Mammoth Cup ski race — a qualifier for the Olympics. But when Wylie Welborn, Adam’s illegitimate grandson, returns after a stint in Afghanistan, it reopens a dark moment in Carson family history: the murder of Wylie’s father by his jealous and very pregnant wife, Cynthia. Her son Sky, born while his mother was in prison, and Wylie are half-brothers. They inherit not only superb athletic skills but also an enmity that threatens to play out in a lethal drama on one of the fastest and most perilous ski slopes in the world.

Three powerful and unusual women have central roles in this volatile family feud: Cynthia, bent on destroying Wylie; his mother Kathleen, determined to protect him; and April Holly, a beautiful celebrity snowboarder, on track to win Olympic Gold. But, as Wylie falls in love with April and they begin to imagine a life away from the violence that has shattered his family, history threatens to repeat itself and destroy them both.

Combining exquisite writing with breathtaking scenes of high-stakes skiing, Crazy Blood is an unforgettable story of two brothers on a ruthless quest for supremacy.

As he did in Laguna Heat, T. Jefferson Parker once again combines his atmospheric style and unforgettable images of California to create a spellbinding mystery that continually anticipates your very thoughts, a novel in which each new revelation comes to you with the force and intimacy of a returning memory.

Pacific Beat begins on a May night in Newport Beach’s Back Bay, when the discovery of a brutally murdered woman with roses bound to her body sets off the kind of manhunt the police and their families dread. The victim, Ann Weir Cruz, is one of their own — and so, it appears, is her killer.

Ann was eight weeks pregnant with a child she and her police lieutenant husband, Ray Cruz, wanted desperately. The only clue to the outrage seems worse than no lead at all: A patrol car was spotted near the scene, disappearing into the fog.

Against a backdrop of corrupt city politics, the delicate and dangerous undercover investigation of the police department falls to the victim’s brother, former detective Jim Weir, who left the force respecting its many secrets and now must expose them one by one. Jim’s understandably fierce pursuit of his sister’s tormentor is a perfect cover, something credible to the cops he is secretly probing. But it is also his genuine debt to Ann. And soon it becomes an agonizing race against Ray, his ex-partner and brother-in-law — because Ray is trying to find the killer first, and execute him.

Palm Springs now joins Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley in California’s Noir Series arena.

With the horrible remnants of a childhood tragedy forever visible across his otherwise handsome face, Joe Trona is scarred in more ways than one. Rescued from an orphanage by Will Trona, a charismatic Orange County politician who sensed his dark potential, Joe is swept into the maelstrom of power and intimidation that surrounds his adoptive father’s illustrious career. Serving as Wills right-hand man, Joe is trained to protect and defend his father’s territory — but he can’t save the powerful man from his enemies. Will Trona is murdered, and Joe will stop at nothing to find out who did it.

Looking for clues as he sifts through the remains of his father’s life — his girlfriends, acquaintances, deals, and enemies — Joe comes to realize how many secrets Will Trona possessed, and how many people he had the power to harm. But two leads keep rising to the surface: a little girl who was kidnapped by her mentally disturbed brother, and two rival gangs who seem to have joined forces. As Joe deepens his investigation — and as he is forced to confront the painful events of his troubled childhood — these two seemingly disconnected threads will intersect. Just how and why form the key to this intricate, intelligent mystery that satisfies the mind as well as the heart — and reveal yet again the impeccable detail, vivid characterization, and emotional complexity that make a T. Jefferson Parker novel impossible to resist.

The best-selling mystery writer Lawrence Block proves his point with the twenty outstanding stories he has chosen for this volume. For fans of the traditional mystery, there’s T. Jefferson Parker’s “Easy Street,” in which a brother’s visit uncovers family secrets. In Jeremiah Healy’s “A Book of Kells,” a detective draws on his Irish heritage to solve a crime. And in Clark Howard’s “Under Suspicion,” a detective’s investigation of the murder of his best friend’s daughter hits too close to home.

However, many of the stories are concerned more with the personalities and motives surrounding the crime than with the crime itself. In Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Girl with the Blackened Eye,” we see a crime from the young victim’s point of view. Jennifer Anderson’s “Things That Make Your Heart Beat Faster” examines the hardships one rookie cop endures while solving her first crime. And in Thomas Lynch’s “Blood Sport,” a young mortician faces the gruesome job of preparing a murdered friend for her funeral.

As Block says: “Three things struck me about the stories in this year’s collection — their range, their variety, and their exceptionally high quality. Crime fiction has always been a broad and inclusive field, but these stories epitomize its breadth, running from the literary to the retro-pulp. The field has always showcased new talent, and a full two thirds of this year’s winners are by writers previously unknown to me. I’ve been reading short crime for half a century, and writing it for almost that long, and I’m still blown away by how very fine these stories are.”

My life was ordinary until three years ago when I was thrown out of a downtown hotel window. My name is Robbie Brownlaw, and I am a homicide detective for the city of San Diego. I am twenty-nine years old.

I now have synesthesia, a neurological condition where your senses get mixed up. Sometimes when people talk to me, I see their voices as colored shapes provoked by the emotions of the speakers, not by the words themselves. I have what amounts to a primitive lie detector. After three years, I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the colors and shapes of other people’s feelings, unless they don’t match up with their words.

When Garrett Asplundh’s body is found under a San Diego bridge, Robbie Brownlaw and his partner, McKenzie Cortez, are called on to the case. After the tragic death of his child and the dissolution of his marriage, Garrett — regarded as an honest, straight-arrow officer — left the SDPD to become an ethics investigator, looking into the activities of his former colleagues. At first his death, which takes place on the eve of a reconciliation with his ex, looks like suicide, but the clues Brownlaw and Cortez find just don’t add up. With pressure mounting from the police and the city’s politicians, Brownlaw fights to find the truth, all the while trying to hold on to his own crumbling marriage. Was Garrett’s death an “execution” or a crime of passion, a personal vendetta or the final step in an elaborate cover-up? Amid rampant corruption and tightening city purse strings, whatever conclusion Brownlaw comes to, the city of San Diego — and Brownlaw’s life — hangs in the balance.

Roland Ford — once a cop, then a marine, now a private investigator — is good at finding people. But when he’s asked to locate Air Force veteran Clay Hickman, he realizes he’s been drawn into something deep and dark. He knows war, having served as a Marine in first Fallujah; he also knows personal pain, as only two years have passed since his wife, Justine, died. What he doesn’t know is why a shroud of secrecy hangs over the disappearance of Clay Hickman — and why he’s getting a different story from everyone involved.

To begin with, there’s Sequoia, the teenage woman who helped Clay escape; she’s smart enough to fend off Ford’s questions but impetuous enough to be on the run with an armed man. Then there’s Paige Hulet, Clay’s doctor, who clearly cares deeply for his welfare but is impossible to read, even as she inspires in Ford the first desire he has felt since his wife’s death. And there’s Briggs Spencer, the proprietor of the mental institution who is as enigmatic as he is brash, and ambitious to the point of being ruthless. What could Clay possibly know to make this search so desperate?

What began as just a job becomes a life-or-death obsession for Ford, pitting him against immensely powerful and treacherous people and forcing him to contend with chilling questions about truth, justice, and the American way.

Terry Naughton, head of Orange County’s Crimes Against Youth unit, is the champion of children. He is their shield and their sword, their protector.

He’s come up against his share of heinous criminals in his years on the force — but nothing has prepared him for the Horridus. Abducting children from their beds, dressing them like little angels, and releasing them the next day, the only clue he leaves is a piece of snakeskin tucked into the folds of their gowns. So far he hasn’t physically harmed any of them, but as Naughton well knows, it’s only a matter of time.

As he races to find the madman before his crimes escalate, Naughton learns that the Horridus may not be the only enemy. When shocking (and seemingly irrefutable) accusations put his career on the line, he is forced to confront his dark and violent past in his search for the truth. Who is behind the setup? And even if he can clear his name, can he do the same for his conscience?

Where Serpents Lie pits the most memorable villain since Hannibal Lecter against an equally unforgettable hero in a thriller that is not only terrifying, but rich in psychological and moral complexity. It’s a novel that will keep readers up at night, long after they’ve turned the last page.