Michael Hudson spends the long days in prison devouring books given to him by the prison’s librarian, a young woman named Anna who develops a soft spot for her best student. Anna keeps passing Michael books until one day he disappears, suddenly released after a private detective manipulated a witness in Michael’s trial.

Outside, Michael encounters a Washington, D.C. that has changed a lot during his time locked up. Once shady storefronts are now trendy beer gardens and flower shops. But what hasn’t changed is the hard choice between the temptation of crime and doing what’s right. Trying to balance his new job, his love of reading, and the debt he owes to the man who got him released, Michael struggles to figure out his place in this new world before he loses control.

CHEAP AT TWICE THE PRICE?

When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger. He nodded to the stranger and looked beyond at the reflection of Dr. Adler.

Parker had been in the sanitarium a little over four weeks now. He had come in with a face that the New York Syndicate wanted to put a bullet in, and now he was going back with a face that meant absolutely nothing to anyone.

It had cost Him $18,000 if it kept him alive long enough to do what he had to do, it would be worth it.

The Marksman is an original novelette, never published anywhere else, that is a crime and adventure story in the best Brian Garfield tradition — a race against the clock, double- and triple-crosses, and a breathtaking confrontation which makes the ending one you’ll never forget.

Whether they’re cops or conmen, savage killers or creative types, gangsters or God-fearing citizens, George Pelecanos’ characters are always engaged in a fight for their lives. They fight to advance or simply to survive; they fight against odds, against enemies, even against themselves. In this, his first collection of stories, the acclaimed novelist introduces readers to a vivid and eclectic cast of combatants.

A seasoned claims investigator tracks a supposedly dead man from Miami to Brazil, only to be thrown off his game by a kid from the local slum. An aging loser takes a last stab at respectability by becoming a police informant. A Greek-American couple adopts an interracial trio of sons and then struggles to keep their family together, giving us a stirring bit of background on one of Pelecanos’ most beloved protagonists, Spero Lucas. In the title novella — which takes its name from... Hollywood slang for the last shot of the day, the one that comes before the liquor shots begin — we go behind the scenes of a television cop show, where a writer gets caught up in a drama more real than anything he could have conjured for a script.

By turns heartbreaking and humane, brutal and funny, these finely constructed tales expose the violence and striving beneath the surface of any city and within any human heart. Tough, sexy, fast-paced, and crackling with energy, The Martini Shot is Pelecanos at his very best.

Robert Goldsborough returns with his seventh stunning Nero Wolfe novel. Follow along into Wolfe’s famed West Thirty-fifth Street brownstone, where the corpulent orchid-tending genius devours meals, books, and murderers with a passion — and where this time he gets the chance to send a writer’s killer to the pen.Charles Childress, the author tapped to continue the beloved Sergeant Barnstable detective stories when the originator died, may not have been the most gifted writer in the world, but he did have his talents... Contentious, combative, and exceedingly vengeful, Childress had an unsurpassed way of making enemies. Which is why, when the police write off his death as suicide, his publisher, Horace Vinson, comes to Nero Wolfe. Vinson knows all too well that in the cutthroat world of publishing, the competition can be murder.Wolfe, however, is not so easily convinced... or distracted from his more genteel pursuits. After all, the evidence does conform to the official version of the killing: The gun found at the crime scene not only belonged to the victim but bore only his fingerprints. Perhaps Childress finally contrived a successful climax... as the author of his own death.But Archie Goodwin, Wolfe’s ever-faithful friend and partner; points out that Vinson’s fee would keep the big man in beer and bouillabaisse for some time to come. That is a reality Nero Wolfe can’t refuse, and soon Archie is posing questions that turn up a whole cast of character assassins, including Childress’s ex-editor and agent, his most scathing critic, and his icily beautiful, ambitious fiancée — each of whom would have taken great pleasure in writing the final chapter in the life of Charles Childress.And then, in a plot twist any auteur would envy, Archie gets wind of the involvement of a mysterious kissing cousin from Childress’s past. Could this be a case of a small-town girl come to right an old wrong? It’s a conundrum so novel even the reluctant Nero Wolfe can’t resist... as extortion, deceit, and jealousy come together in a perfect potboiler of revenge — and murder.

Miranda Shaw was a rich and recent widow in her early fifties. The head lifeguard at the Penguin Beach Club, Grady Keaton, was exactly half her age. When Grady and Miranda dropped out of sight at the same time, rumors began to circulate among the other members and employees of the club. And when Admiral Young’s two somewhat addled daughters, Cordelia and Juliet, spotted some of Miranda’s jewels at an estate auction, the rumors darkened and the hunt was on.

Tom Aragon, the engaging lawyer who solved the bizarre mystery in Ask for Me Tomorrow, has to undertake an even stranger case in Margaret Millar’s new tragicomedy. Aragon has the dubious assistance of nine-year-old Frederic Quinn, who boasts of his Mafia connections at private school. Adding to the confusion is Mr. Van Eyck, who, under cover of age and convenient spells of deafness, eavesdrops on his fellow members and commits his findings to paper in the form of anonymous letters.

Margaret Millar’s new novel is one of her best, and certainly her funniest. Its structure is as dazzling as its prose is witty. The author contrives to postpone the full solution until the last words of the final sentence, when the elements of the plot come together and the characters who sustain it, living and dead, are shown in tragic relation to each other.

LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis has solved a lot of murder cases. On many of them — the ones he calls “different” — he taps the brain of brilliant psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware. But neither Alex nor Milo are prepared for what they find on an early morning call to a deserted mansion in Bel Air. This one’s beyond different. This is predation, premeditation, and cruelty on a whole new level.

Four people have been slaughtered and left displayed bizarrely and horrifically in a stretch limousine. Confounding the investigation, none of the victims seems to have any connection to any other, and a variety of methods have been used to dispatch them. As Alex and Milo make their way through blind alleys and mazes baited with misdirection, they encounter a crime so vicious that it stretches the definitions of evil.

The smell of stale bedrooms and warm gin hovered over that whole section of town. The women, even the young girls, walked a certain way, looked at men a certain way.

There was a drifting threat of violence everywhere, and the kids of the neighborhood knew all about knives, garrison belts and bicycle chains long before they were pushed into high school by weary truant officers.

In a sleepy French village, the body of a man shot through the head is disinterred by the roots of a fallen tree. A week later a famous art critic is viciously murdered in a nearby house. The deaths occurred more than seventy years apart.

Asked by a colleague to inspect the site of the former, forensics expert Enzo Macleod quickly finds himself embroiled in the investigation of the latter. Two extraordinary narratives are set in train — one historical, unfolding in the treacherous wartime years of Occupied France; the other contemporary, set in the autumn of 2020 as France re-enters Covid lockdown.

And Enzo’s investigations reveal an unexpected link between the murders — the Mona Lisa.

Tasked by the exiled General Charles de Gaulle to keep the world’s most famous painting out of Nazi hands after the fall of France in 1940, 28-year-old Georgette Pignal finds herself swept along by the tide of history. Following in the wake of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as it is moved from château to château by the Louvre, she finds herself just one step ahead of two German art experts sent to steal it for rival patrons — Hitler and Göring.

What none of them know is that the Louvre itself has taken exceptional measures to keep the painting safe, unwittingly setting in train a fatal sequence of events extending over seven decades.

Events that have led to both killings.

The Night Gate spans three generations, taking us from war-torn London, the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, Berlin and Vichy France, to the deadly enemy facing the world in 2020. In his latest novel, Peter May shows why he is one of the great contemporary writers of crime fiction.