Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Crime Fiction

Bob Christopher is Los Angeles' Channel Three television-newsaction reporter. His beat is the little people - the ones who get pushed around, find themselves in god-awful messes, and produce "human interest" for the insatiable maw of television. But this story was different from the first, when a tiny old lady told Christopher about the bulldozers that had leveled her home without reason or warning. That was ugly enough. What happened to the old lady a little while later was even nastier. And suddenly Bob isn't dealing with the little people any more.

Willie Bledsoe, once an idealistic young black activist, is now a burnt-out case. After leaving a snug berth at Tuskegee Institute to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he has become bitterly disillusioned with the civil rights movement and its leaders. He returns home to Alabama to try to write a memoir about his time in the cultural whirlwind, but the words fail to come. The surprise return of his Vietnam veteran brother in the spring of 1967 gives Willie a chance to drive a load of smuggled guns to the Motor City....

It's everyday business when Wattles, the San Fernando Valley's top "executive crook", sets up a hit. He establishes a chain of criminals to pass along the instructions and the money, thereby ensuring that the hitter doesn't know who hired him. Then one day Wattles finds his office safe open and a single item missing: the piece of paper listing the crooks in the chain. When people associated with the chain begin to pop up dead, the only person Wattles can turn to for help is Junior Bender, professional burglar and begrudging private eye for crooks.

As a private investigator, Kathleen Stone relies on her ability to blend into the background. Aided by her street-smart drag queen friend and the best wigmaker in New York City, she feels confident that her camouflage is up to snuff. But when a cheating spouse she's been trailing endsup dead under suspicious circumstances, she fears that someone she angered in her past job - busting gangs and drug dealers as an undercover cop - has seen through her disguises.

In Gasconade County, Missouri - once called the meth capital of the world - Deputy Sheriff Dale Banks discovers $52,000 hidden in the broken-down trailer that Jerry Dean Skaggs uses for cooking crystal. And he takes it. Banks knows what he did was wrong, but he did it for all the right reasons. At least, he thinks so. But for every wrong deed, there is a consequence.

A killer Mike Hammer's old friend Captain Pat Chambers had put away many years ago is suddenly freed on new, seemingly indisputable evidence, and Hammer wonders if this outwardly placid, very odd old man might somehow be engineering cop killings that all seem to be either accidental or by natural causes. At the same time, Hammer and Velda are dealing with the fallout - some of it mob, some of it federal government - over the $89billion cache the detective is (rightly) suspected of finding not long ago.

Unconventional police rookie Luke Jones is back to work after reluctantly killing a man he knew and liked in order to save the life of a partner he despises. Although labeled a hero by some, he's soon up to his old tricks - doggedly challenging authority in an organization with little tolerance for defiance, irritating peers and superiors alike by quoting Shakespeare at will, and refusing to back down when prudence dictates surrender.

While at a reading of a Kurt Vonnegut biography, private investigator Jim Wolf senses someone watching him. He catches sight of a young woman, maybe mid-twenties, who is short and has straight, straw-colored blond hair, granny glasses, and freckles. Her figure is more boyish than that of a grown woman. She wears jeans and a man's white dress shirt, and a cheap necklace of amber-colored beads with silver disks circles her neck. Her name is Emily.

After six long years of political genocide carried out against the American people by the administration of President Benjamin Franklin Luder, the nation is stunned when Luder announces that he is issuing an executive order to suspend the next presidential election for "the good of the country," giving him an unconstitutional third term as president. Luder has slowly and systematically robbed the citizens of various liberties and freedoms through similar acts, and in the process he has nearly destroyed the once-greatest country on earth.

Natasha Doroshenko, a Ukrainian woman who has been arrested for murdering her Danish fiancé, escapes police custody on her way to an interrogation in Copenhagen's police headquarters. It isn't the first time Natasha has lost a partner to violent ends: her first husband was also murdered three years earlier, in Kiev, and in the same manner, his hands broken. At the same time, someone tries to abduct Natasha's eight-year-old daughter from the Red Cross center that has been caring for her while her mother, an illegal immigrant, was in jail.

In the tenth audiobook of the popular Butch Karp legal thriller series, Karp and family fight to stop terrorists and demagogues from splitting the city in two. A Jewish couple is assaulted and left for dead behind the counter of their deli, and anti-Israel graffiti is scrawled in Arabic above their bodies. Evidence points to a few clueless teens, but this seemingly open-and-shut case soon threatens to become a dangerous and divisive media circus.

In 1904, the future best-selling writer Edna Ferber, then a 19-year-old fledgling reporter in Wisconsin, teams up with famed escape artist Harry Houdini to solve the baffling murder of a girl who has mysteriously disappeared from a locked room at the local high school.

Acclaimed crime fiction writer Jim Nisbet sets forth a noir gem that lays bare the foibles of modern-day America with tremendous force. Banerjhee Rolf, a bright, levelheaded Indian American scientist, is content to spend his days with his wife, tending his garden and studying his beloved astronomy. When Rolf ’s relationship with Toby Pride, his seedy, drug-dealing neighbor, and Pride’s stoner girlfriend takes a weird turn, Rolf’s placid world is shattered, and he becomes a fugitive from justice.

While running surveillance in an industrial section of Scottsdale, P.I. Lena Jones discovers the body of a woman connected to Second Zion, an infamous polygamy cult based in northern Arizona. Lena joins forces with Rosella, a former polygamist "sister wife," to find the victim's killer and soon discovers a shocking secret: in a society where one man can have ten wives, nine men will have none. Second Zion makes certain these possible rivals don't stick around.

Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Roger "Butch" Karp has been around New York long enough to realize that the judicial system can be dirty and cynical. But he still believes in justice. So when a vicious sociopath tries to dodge a brutal murder charge by convincing the court he is incompetent to stand trial, Karp teams up with firecracker Assistant DA Marlene Ciampi to unleash the full force of their relentless energy, hardboiled wit, and passion for the truth to put the killer away for good. They will accept no lesser plea.

On a crowded train from Pusan to Seoul, the brutal rape of a young mother sparks rage on the powder-keg peninsula of Korea, pitting Koreans against Americans and the 8th Army brass against the truth. Eyewitness accounts indicate the culprit was most likely a U.S. serviceman, but by the time Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, U.S. Army investigators, are called in, the rapist has disappeared and anti-American fervor in this proud Asian country is threatening to explode.

Cincinnati homicide detective Will Borders now walks with a cane and lives alone in constant discomfort. He’s lucky to be alive. He’s lucky to have his job as public information officer for the department. But when a star cop is brutally murdered, Borders is assigned to find her killer. The crime bears a chilling similarity to killings on the once peaceful college campus nearby, where his friend Cheryl Beth Wilson teaches nursing. The two young victims were her students. Most homicides are routine, the suspects readily apparent. But there are no obvious suspects in this new case.

This account of a fugitive gun moll masterfully compresses the essence of "noir" fiction.

A starlet's plot to blackmail a film-studio executive results in her murder. Only the "trouble chaser" can clear her volatile lover and solve the crime.

Amid the shifting world of San Francisco flea markets, shady vendors sell junk, precious antiques, and stolen goods side by side. Somewhere in the mix, a priceless collection of sacred Torah scrolls is gathering dust - and attracting a group of fanatical killers. When private investigator Sharon McCone helps one flea market kingpin fend off a stalker, she's drawn into the netherworld of deal-making and thievery, a dangerous milieu seldom seen by outsiders.