Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Modern Detectives

What could be more innocent than watching old movies? For Neil Catalin, a wealthy man with a happy home, old-fashioned pictures were a hobby that became an obsession. But he wasn’t watching The Wizard of Oz. Crime movies were his passion, the sort where life is cheap and death is free, and Catalin sank himself into them as an escape from the stresses of suburbia. Now he has disappeared, and his wife believes the clue may be in his collection of gruesome classics.

Hattie Evans, a retired schoolteacher, isn’t one to fuss. When her husband drops dead of a heart attack, she does her best to move on without too many tears. After all, Jerome was 70 years old. But an anonymous note, asserting that her husband was murdered, shakes her resolve, and she seeks out help. The police are useless, save that they send her to Fred Carver - a former Orlando cop who turned PI when a bullet shattered his left knee. Her case takes Carver into the depths of Solartown: an old-age mecca where 70 is the new 40, golf carts are the only way to get around, and death from natural causes is nowhere to be found.

The high spot of Teddy Folger's life was the day in 1954 that he got an autographed baseball card from Joe DiMaggio himself. It's been downhill ever since. Which is why he just unloaded his freeloading wife and torched his own comic-book store - in one of the stupidest insurance scams in history. Enter Conner Samson. The down-on-his-luck repo man has just been hired to repossess Teddy's boat. Little does he know there's a baseball card on board that some men are willing to kill for. Thus begins a rip-roaring cross-country odyssey - and with bodies piling up, the squeeze is on for the penultimate piece of Americana.

Wilson has spent his entire life under the radar. Few people know who he is, and even fewer know how to find him. Only two people even know his real occupation: carrying out confidential - and illegal - jobs for a very bad man. But one day he crosses the line, saving his friends and earning the hatred of a vengeful mob boss.

Until the helicopter crash, Jill Smith never knew fear. A homicide detective in the leftist enclave of Berkeley, California, she has faced down her share of thugs, thieves, and killers, but since surviving the downed helicopter, her nerves have been shot. Unwilling to submit to her anxiety, she goes back to work. The chef and owner of Paradise, an upscale restaurant in Berkeley’s so-called “Gourmet Ghetto,” is found on the floor of his own kitchen, poisoned by the soup he was seasoning.

Back in 1964, tragedy struck when Peter Redburn and his friends were playing together. Now an adult, Peter has never been able to escape his feelings of guilt. A funeral forces him to confront the rivalries and secrets of the past.

John Blake and Miranda Sugarman dated in high school, but after graduation they went their separate ways: he stayed in New York City and became a private investigator while she moved to the midwest and settled down to a safe, respectable life as an eye doctor. Or so he thought -- until the day, ten years later, when he opened the Daily News and saw Miranda's photo staring out at him under the headline "STRIPPER MURDERED."

“Tander Phigg was an asshole, but he was also a Barnburner. Barnburners saved my life. I help them when I can. No exceptions.” The job seems simple. Conway Sax, a no-nonsense auto mechanic with a knack for solving difficult problems, has never liked obnoxious blowhard Tander Phigg. But a promise is a promise. Tander’s a Barnburner, a member of the unique Alcoholics Anonymous group that rescued Conway, and when a Barnburner has a problem, Conway takes care of it.

Although the citizens of Berkeley are famously tolerant, that progressive attitude disappears at the property line between the homes of Dr. Hasbrouck Diamond and Leila Sandoval. In the Berkeley hills , there are no worse neighbors than Diamond and Sandoval. What began as a tiff about garbage cans and street parking has exploded into full-blown war, drawing in the city, the press, and now—to the irritation of detective Jill Smith—the police department.

A perfectly planned jewel heist begins to go wrong when Gloria Vane, the beautiful film starlet, is abducted by the escaping robbers. When gang leader Ace Monohan begins to fall for Gloria, it leads to dissension amongst his men, and the destruction and abandonment of his hideout. With Ace - still holding the stolen jewels - being forced to go on the run alone, Gloria is free of his unwelcome attentions - only to fall into the hands of rival gangster "Fingers" Baxter, who plans to use her as a cat's-paw to lure Ace out of hiding.

Conway Sax, the no-nonsense auto mechanic with a knack for solving difficult problems for the Barnburners - the renegade AA group who saved his life - is back in The Whole Lie. And for once, he thinks normalcy is within reach. He’s opening a new garage, and he’s finally moved in with longtime girlfriend Charlene. The end of his parole is finally in sight. Then along comes Savannah Kane: smart, smoky, and a pusher of men’s buttons. Seven years ago, Conway helped her disappear....

This is the world of the undercover operative: a world of lies, treachery, and deception. A world where violence erupts without warning, like a ticking time bomb on a crowded bus. It isn't a matter of if that bomb will go off - it is a matter of how close you are to it when it does.

With his detective agency facing hard times, Charlie Bradshaw moonlights as night manager at a Saratoga Springs hotel. Victor, his partner, snaps pictures of the happy tourists. But not all the tourists are happy with this self-styled Saratoga Snapper. When one "candid" subject runs Victor down and steals his camera, Charlie gets caught up in a dangerous scheme worthy of Saratoga's colorful past. It proves that passions still roil in this quiet resort town.

The second novel in the Roth trilogy is the story of David Byfield, a widowed parish priest with a dark past and a darker future. Set in 1970 in a commuter village near London, the novel explores the consequences of Byfield's second marriage.

Honky-Tonk Street--a dark, lonely, sordid edge of town--a place where Johnny Nickles and his jazz band are playing hot sets in seedy clubs and rundown bars. But a killer is stalking Johnny's band, and Johnny finds himself trapped in a deadly game of chicken with a local power broker, a corrupt sheriff, and a professional thug for hire.

Inspired by 50 years of Cuban literary noir, from Cold Tales by Virgilio Piera to Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls, Robert Arellano's Havana Lunar intertwines an insider testimony on the collapse of socialist Cuba with a psychological mystery.

After six months of perfect weather, the people of Berkeley, California, have forgotten how to drive during a thunderstorm. Newly christened homicide detective Jill Smith is on her way home to a chocolate ice cream dinner when she gets caught in a traffic jam at the city’s only roundabout. At the front of the line, she sees the trouble: a flipped-over Cadillac and one dead driver. The man behind the wheel was one of the city’s leading citizens, a philanthropist in a town that puts charity first.

From the start, nothing goes fright for Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones. They are disciplined for use of excessive force. Grave Digger is shot, and his death announced in a hoax radio bulletin. Bodies pile up faster than Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones can run. Yet, try as they might, they always seem to be one hot step behind the cause of all the mayhem: three million dollars' worth of heroine and a simple albino called Pinky.

DCI Mark Lapslie suffers from a rare neurological condition that ‘cross-wires’ his senses. The sickening clamour of sounds he can taste has smothered his marriage and stifled his career...and it’s getting worse. His colleagues have written him off as a drunk – or worse – and Lapslie has quarantined himself in an isolated Essex cottage. Carl Whittley has got his own problems to deal with too: he’s just tortured a minor TV celebrity to death and blown an apparently anonymous commuter to pieces.

Mike Foley can never forget the night he tagged along with his brother on a job for the mob that ended in a hail of bullets. Now his brother is dead, Mike’s making wine in Oklahoma, and life is almost as good as it gets when you’ve been hiding out for 40 years. Until his past comes calling. Mike’s nephew Andrew needs to disappear, and he needs to do it yesterday. Hanging with the wrong kind of friends, he’s seen something he shouldn’t have, and now he’s running for his life with an assassin on his trail.