From Dennis Lehane, the award-winning author of Mystic River, Shutter Island, and the Kenzie-Gennaro series, comes a striking collection of five short stories and a play.A small southern town gives birth to a dangerous man with a broken heart and a high-powered rifle... A young girl, caught up in an inner-city gang war, crosses the line from victim to avenger... An innocent man is hunted by government agents for an unspecified crime... A boy and a girl fall in love while ransacking a rich man's house during the waning days of the Vietnam War... A compromised psychiatrist confronts the unstable patient he slept with... A father and a son wage a lethal battle of wits over the whereabouts of a stolen diamond and a missing woman... Along with completely original material, this new collection is a compilation of the best of Dennis Lehane’s previously published short stories, including “Until Gwen,” which was adapted for the stage in 2005 and appears in this book as the play Coronado.At turns suspenseful, surreal, romantic, and tragically comic, these tales journey headlong into the heart of our national myths — about class, gender, freedom, and regeneration through violence — and reveal that the truth waiting for us there is not what we'd expect.

Edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci and including stories by Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, and more, this one-of-a-kind anthology pulls together the most beloved characters from the best and most popular thriller series today. Worlds collide!In an unprecedented collaboration, twenty-three of the world’s bestselling and critically acclaimed thriller writers have paired their series characters — such as Harry Bosch, Jack Reacher, and Lincoln Rhyme — in an eleven-story anthology curated by the International Thriller Writers (ITW). All of the contributors to FaceOff are ITW members and the stories feature these dynamic duos:• Patrick Kenzie vs. Harry Bosch in “Red Eye,” by Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly• John Rebus vs. Roy Grace in “In the Nick of Time,” by Ian Rankin and Peter James• Slappy the Ventriloquist Dummy vs. Aloysius Pendergast in “Gaslighted,” by R.L. Stine, Douglas Preston, and Lincoln Child• Malachai Samuels vs. D.D. Warren in “The Laughing Buddha,” by M.J. Rose and Lisa Gardner• Paul Madriani vs. Alexandra Cooper in “Surfing the Panther,” by Steve Martini and Linda Fairstein• Lincoln Rhyme vs. Lucas Davenport in “Rhymes With Prey,” by Jeffery Deaver and John Sandford• Michael Quinn vs. Repairman Jack in “Infernal Night,” by Heather Graham and F. Paul Wilson• Sean Reilly vs. Glen Garber in “Pit Stop,” by Raymond Khoury and Linwood Barclay• Wyatt Hunt vs. Joe Trona in “Silent Hunt,” by John Lescroart and T. Jefferson Parker• Cotton Malone vs. Gray Pierce in “The Devil’s Bones,” by Steve Berry and James Rollins• Jack Reacher vs. Nick Heller in “Good and Valuable Consideration,” by Lee Child and Joseph FinderSo sit back and prepare for a rollicking ride as your favorite characters go head-to-head with some worthy opponents in *FaceOff*—it’s a thrill-a-minute read.

Boston PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro have been hired to find a six-year-old girl who vanished from her home without a trace. Despite enormous public attention, extensive news coverage, and dogged police work, the investigation has gone nowhere. But it's a case rife with sinister circumstances: a strangely indifferent mother, a pedophile couple, a bizarre subculture of homeless parents, and a shadowy police unit with a covert agenda and no qualms about enforcing it.

Boston, 1926. The ’20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city’s most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one—neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover—can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa’s Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.

Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood twelve years ago. Desperate pleas for help from the child's aunt led investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl-only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home.Now Amanda is sixteen-and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing. Yet Amanda's aunt is once more knocking on Patrick Kenzie's door, fearing the worst for the little girl who has blossomed into a striking, clever young woman-a woman who hasn't been seen in weeks.

Karen Nichols was pert, blonde, in love with her and her life when Patrick Kenzie first met her. But six months later, she jumped naked from Boston 's Custom House, leaving behind a downward spiral of drug abuse, depression, and sexual misadventure. She was an utterly different woman and Kenzie wants to know why. What he finds is almost incomprehensible: a depraved stalker who carefully targeted Karen and slowly, methodically, exploited her every weakness, stripped away all that mattered to her, and then watched her self-destruct. Now as Kenzie and his former partner Angela Gennaro begin a psychological battle against a master sadist the law can't touch, they discover he's starting to learn their weaknesses, their loves and he's determined to tear their world apart.

Jimmy, Dave y Sean crecieron juntos en la sección peligrosa de Boston. Veinticinco años después vuelven a reunirse, cuando la hija de 19 años de Jimmy es brutalmente asesinada. Sean, que ahora es policía, es asignado para resolver el caso. Además de desenredar este crimen, Sean deberá estar pendiente de su amigo Jimmy, quien busca vengarse del asesino de su hija. Conectado al crimen por una serie de circunstancias, Dave se ve obligado a enfrentarse con los demonios de su propio pasado. A medida que la investigación se concentra alrededor de estos tres amigos, se despliega una siniestra historia, que tiene que ver con la amistad, la familia y la inocencia perdida demasiado pronto.

Jimmy, Dave y Sean crecieron juntos en la sección peligrosa de Boston. Veinticinco años después vuelven a reunirse, cuando la hija de 19 años de Jimmy es brutalmente asesinada. Sean, que ahora es policía, es asignado para resolver el caso. Además de desenredar este crimen, Sean deberá estar pendiente de su amigo Jimmy, quien busca vengarse del asesino de su hija. Conectado al crimen por una serie de circunstancias, Dave se ve obligado a enfrentarse con los demonios de su propio pasado. A medida que la investigación se concentra alrededor de estos tres amigos, se despliega una siniestra historia, que tiene que ver con la amistad, la familia y la inocencia perdida demasiado pronto.

Jimmy, Dave y Sean crecieron juntos en la sección peligrosa de Boston. Veinticinco años después vuelven a reunirse, cuando la hija de 19 años de Jimmy es brutalmente asesinada. Sean, que ahora es policía, es asignado para resolver el caso. Además de desenredar este crimen, Sean deberá estar pendiente de su amigo Jimmy, quien busca vengarse del asesino de su hija. Conectado al crimen por una serie de circunstancias, Dave se ve obligado a enfrentarse con los demonios de su propio pasado. A medida que la investigación se concentra alrededor de estos tres amigos, se despliega una siniestra historia, que tiene que ver con la amistad, la familia y la inocencia perdida demasiado pronto.

Summer, 1954.U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find an escaped patient, a murderess named Rachel Solando, as a hurricane bears down upon them.But nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems.And neither is Teddy Daniels.Is he there to find a missing patient? Or has he been sent to look into rumors of Ashecliffe’s radical approach to psychiatry? An approach that may include drug experimentation, hideous surgical trials, and lethal countermoves in the shadow war against Soviet brainwashing…Or is there another, more personal reason why he has come there?As the investigation deepens, the questions only mount:How has a barefoot woman escaped the island from a locked room?Who is leaving clues in the form of cryptic codes?Why is there no record of a patient committed there just one year before?What really goes on in Ward C?Why is an empty lighthouse surrounded by an electrified fence and armed guards?The closer Teddy and Chuck get to the truth, the more elusive it becomes, and the more they begin to believe that they may never leave Shutter Island.Because someone is trying to drive them insane…

Since We Fell follows Rachel Childs, a former journalist who, after an on-air mental breakdown, now lives as a virtual shut-in. In all other respects, however, she enjoys an ideal life with an ideal husband. Until a chance encounter on a rainy afternoon causes that ideal life to fray. As does Rachel’s marriage. As does Rachel herself. Sucked into a conspiracy thick with deception, violence, and possibly madness, Rachel must find the strength within herself to conquer unimaginable fears and mind-altering truths.By turns heart-breaking, suspenseful, romantic, and sophisticated, Since We Fell is a novel of profound psychological insight and tension. It is Dennis Lehane at his very best.

In the summer of 1974, a heat wave blankets Boston, and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of Southie, the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.One night, Mary Pat’s teenage daughter, Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances.The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched — asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business.Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city’s desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.

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.

In his introduction to the The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, 'noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction. It's the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It's the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad.' Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction.James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, series editor of the annual The Best American Mystery Stories, mined one hundred years of writing - 1910-2010 - to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's 'Pastorale,' and its post-war heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing in the last decade.

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