Этот сборник — настоящая сенсация.Эд Макбейн включил в него работы самых знаменитых мастеров остросюжетной литературы США — «короля ужасов» Стивена Кинга, «живых классиков» детектива — Дональда Уэстлейка и Лоренса Блока, не знающей себе равных среди авторов интеллектуального триллера Джойс Кэрол Оутс…И многих других писателей, каждый из которых — явление в современной детективной литературе.Все произведения, вошедшие в сборник, написаны специально для антологии!

Этот сборник — настоящая сенсация.Эд Макбейн включил в него работы самых знаменитых мастеров остросюжетной литературы США — «короля ужасов» Стивена Кинга, «живых классиков» детектива — Дональда Уэстлейка и Лоренса Блока, не знающей себе равных среди авторов интеллектуального триллера Джойс Кэрол Оутс…И многих других писателей, каждый из которых — явление в современной детективной литературе.Все произведения, вошедшие в сборник, написаны специально для антологии!

Это не добрые рождественские сказки, которые так хорошо читать детям на ночь.Это страшные истории о тьме, которая стоит за порогом и ждет, когда ты сделаешь один неверный шаг, о странных и жутких существах, которые бродят за окном и иногда заглядывают по твою душу.Нил Гейман и Эл Саррантонио собрали лучшие рассказы в жанре хоррор и саспенс, написанные признанными мастерами американской прозы (Чак Паланик, Майкл Муркок, Уолтер Мосли, Майкл Суэнвик…). Перед вами – коллекция умных, тонких, изысканно интеллектуальных, захватывающих и по-настоящему страшных историй: дверь, через которую Бездна всматривается в человека.

Это не добрые рождественские сказки, которые так хорошо читать детям на ночь.Это страшные истории о тьме, которая стоит за порогом и ждет, когда ты сделаешь один неверный шаг, о странных и жутких существах, которые бродят за окном и иногда заглядывают по твою душу.Нил Гейман и Эл Саррантонио собрали лучшие рассказы в жанре хоррор и саспенс, написанные признанными мастерами американской прозы (Чак Паланик, Майкл Муркок, Уолтер Мосли, Майкл Суэнвик…). Перед вами — коллекция умных, тонких, изысканно интеллектуальных, захватывающих и по-настоящему страшных историй: дверь, через которую Бездна всматривается в человека.

In a brilliant departure for Walter Mosley, author of the bestselling Easy Rawlins mystery series, Blue Light imagines a world in which human potential is suddenly, amazingly fulfilled — a change that calls into question the meaning of human differences and the ultimate purpose and fate of the human race.

From an unknown point in the universe, an inscrutable blue light approaches our solar system. When it reaches Earth, it transforms those it strikes, causing them instantaneously to evolve beyond the present state of humanity. Each person imbued with the light becomes the full realization of his or her nature and potential, with strengths, understanding, and communication abilities far beyond our imagining.Blue Light is the story of these people and their transformation. Narrated by Chance, a biracial man whose entire life has been a struggle for self-definition, the novel traces the desperate conflict of the “Blues” with one of their own, a man who — struck by the light at the moment he expired — has become the living embodiment of death. Written as a kind of gospel in which Chance describes the wanderings of this tribe and their ultimate, apocalyptic battle, the account is also full of his uncertainties — about his own place in this strange new world and about whether he may be recording the beginning of the end of the human race.

Ben Dibbuk has a good job, an accomplished wife, a bright college-age daughter, and a patient young mistress. Even as he goes through the motions of everyday life, however, inside he feels nothing. The explanation for this emotional void lies in the years he spent as a blacked-out drunk before pulling his life together-years in which he knows he committed acts he doesn’t remember.

Then a woman from his past turns up at a gala for his wife’s new gig at a magazine called Diablerie and makes it clear that she remembers something he doesn’t. Their encounter sets wheels in motion that will propel Dibbuk toward new knowledge, and perhaps the chance to feel again.

Joe King Oliver was one of the NYPD’s finest investigators, until, dispatched to arrest a well-heeled car thief, he is framed for assault by his enemies within the NYPD, a charge which lands him in solitary at Rikers Island.

A decade later, King is a private detective, running his agency with the help of his teenage daughter, Aja-Denise. Broken by the brutality he suffered and committed in equal measure while behind bars, his work and his daughter are the only light in his solitary life. When he receives a card in the mail from the woman who admits she was paid to frame him those years ago, King realizes that he has no choice but to take his own case: figuring out who on the force wanted him disposed of — and why.

Running in parallel with King’s own quest for justice is the case of a Black radical journalist accused of killing two on-duty police officers who had been abusing their badges to traffic in drugs and women within the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Joined by Melquarth Frost, a brilliant sociopath, our hero must beat dirty cops and dirtier bankers, craven lawyers, and above all keep his daughter far from the underworld in which he works. All the while, two lives hang in the balance: King’s client’s, and King’s own.

In a Las Vegas hotel room, a man awakes to confront his destiny

Dreaming, Jack hears voices: a frightened child in a hospital, a woman cheating on her husband, a death-row inmate. When he wakes, the voices recede, but they do not vanish. He is in a luxurious hotel room on the Vegas strip, and his body is covered in scars. Jack Strong is a patchwork man, his flesh melded together from dozens of men and women, and his mind is the same way. Countless lifetimes are contained within him: people whose time was cut short, and who see their place in Jack as a chance to make things right.

On behalf of one of them, Jack reignites a feud with corrupt casino bosses. Drawing on the skills of another, he beats the life out of two bodyguards. Jack fights for control as he lurches from impulse to impulse, certain that somewhere within him exists a soul. The answers may lie with whomever is tailing him in a sleek black car — if Jack can somehow confront him.

A convention-defying novel by bestselling writer Walter Mosley, John Woman recounts the transformation of an unassuming boy named Cornelius Jones into John Woman, an unconventional history professor — while the legacy of a hideous crime lurks in the shadows.

At twelve years old, Cornelius, the son of an Italian-American woman and an older black man from Mississippi named Herman, secretly takes over his father’s job at a silent film theater in New York’s East Village. Five years later, as Herman lives out his last days, he shares his wisdom with his son, explaining that the person who controls the narrative of history controls their own fate. After his father dies and his mother disappears, Cornelius sets about reinventing himself — as Professor John Woman, a man who will spread Herman’s teachings into the classrooms of his unorthodox southwestern university and beyond. But there are other individuals who are attempting to influence the narrative of John Woman, and who might know something about the facts of his hidden past.

Engaging with some of the most provocative ideas of recent intellectual history, John Woman is a compulsively readable, deliciously unexpected novel about the way we tell stories, and whether the stories we tell have the power to change the world.

Sovereign James wakes up one morning to discover that he’s gone blind.

Sovereign’s doctors can’t find anything wrong with him, nor does he remember any physical or psychological trauma. Unless his sight returns, Sovereign has reached the end of his 25-year career in human resources. A couple of weeks later he is violently mugged on the street. His sight briefly, miraculously returns during the attack: for a few seconds, he can see as well as hear a young female bystander’s cries of distress. Now he must grapple with two questions: What caused him to lose his vision — and, perhaps more troubling, why does violence restore it? As Sovereign searches for the woman he glimpsed, he will come to question everything he valued about his former life.

Walter Mosley’s acclaimed Easy Rawlins mysteries are not only best-selling crime thrillers; they are also serious novels of depth and complexity that open up the physical, social, and moral landscape of postwar Los Angeles to probing examination. So the publication of his first nongenre novel, RL’s Dream, is in every way a literary event.

RL’s Dream is a novel about the blues — the blues as an expression of black poetry and black tragedy and how they sit in judgment on the American experience. In contemporary New York, aging bluesman Soupspoon Wise is alone, ill, and dying. He has played his music in a thousand bars, clubs, and juke joints, but never so memorably as the time he played with one Robert “RL” Johnson in the Mississippi delta. That brief, indelible encounter with the great genius of country blues haunts Soupspoon, much as Johnson himself is said to have been possessed by Satan. And so Soupspoon proceeds to tell his story to Kiki Waters, the young white woman who has taken him in, another refugee from a South she can neither deny nor escape.

As these two unforgettable characters come to terms with the difficult legacy of the past, Walter Mosley shapes their story into a prose ballad — a blues — of pain and redemption. As in his mysteries, he breathes life into folks who live on the margins of American life, teaching us that we can’t know who we are until we remember where we came from. RL’s Dream sings.

Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for television. The Awkward Black Man collects seventeen of Mosley’s most accomplished short stories to showcase the full range of his remarkable talent.

Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories — heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved, and, on the whole, odd. He overturns the stereotypes that corral black male characters and paints a subtle, powerful portrait of each of these unique individuals. In “The Good News Is,” a man’s insecurity about his weight gives way to a serious illness and the intense loneliness that accompanies it. Deeply vulnerable, he allows himself to be taken advantage of in return for a little human comfort in a raw display of true need. “Pet Fly,” previously published in the New Yorker, follows a man working as a mailroom clerk for a big company — a solitary job for which he is overqualified — and the unforeseen repercussions he endures when he attempts to forge a connection beyond the one he has with the fly buzzing around his apartment. And “Almost Alyce” chronicles failed loves, family loss, alcoholism, and a Zen approach to the art of begging that proves surprisingly effective.

Touching and contemplative, each of these unexpected stories offers the best of one of our most gifted writers.

In this volume, guest editor Sue Grafton and series editor Otto Penzler offer up their choices for the best suspense, crime, and mystery stories of the year. Included in these thrilling tales is Scott Bartels’s dark and violent “Swear Not by the Moon,” in which a drug-addicted Creole is caught between good intentions and bad decisions. In Janice Law’s haunting “Secrets,” an Irish immigrant mother and daughter are faced with unexpected cruelties as they try to make a new life for themselves. And in Lawrence Block’s clever Edgar Award-winning story “Keller on the Spot,” a contract killer uncharacteristically saves a life and finds his assignment becoming increasingly complicated.

The diverse styles and themes employed in this collection showcase an impressive array of talent certain to further the popularity of the genre. Already a bestseller in its first year, The Best American Mystery Stories, as evidenced by this year’s edition, promises to keep readers intrigued and coming back for more.

Best-selling author Scott Turow takes the helm for the tenth edition of this annual, featuring twenty-one of the past year’s most distinguished tales of mystery, crime, and suspense.

Elmore Leonard tells the tale of a young woman who’s fled home with a convicted bank robber. Walter Mosley describes an over-the-hill private detective and his new client, a woman named Karma. C. J. Box explores the fate of two Czech immigrants stranded by the side of the road in Yellowstone Park. Ed McBain begins his story on role-playing with the line “ ‘Why don’t we kill somebody?’ she suggested.” Wendy Hornsby tells of a wild motorcycle chase through the canyons outside Las Vegas. Laura Lippman describes the “Crack Cocaine Diet.” And James Lee Burke writes of a young boy who may have been a close friend of Bugsy Siegel.

As Scott Turow notes in his introduction, these stories are “about crime — its commission, its aftermath, its anxieties, its effect on character.” The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 is a powerful collection for all readers who enjoy fiction that deals with the extremes of human passion and its dark consequences.