Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Hard-Boiled

Tensions have been running high in White River as it approaches the anniversary of a fatal shooting of a black motorist by a local police officer. The economically depressed, racially polarized city is on edge, confronted with angry demonstrations, arson, and looting. In the midst of the turmoil, a White River police officer is shot dead by an unknown sniper. As the town spirals out of control, local authorities approach Dave Gurney to conduct an independent investigation of the shooting. But when he zeroes in on peculiar aspects of the individual murders that follow, his involvement is suddenly terminated.

A beautiful woman paid it with her body. A seedy lawyer used somebody else's money. It's the vig - the exorbitant interest mob loan sharks take on their money. Now, in the city by the Bay, everyone has to pay.

LAPD detective Michael Gideon and his German shepherd K-9 partner, Sirius, walked through fire to catch an infamous serial killer, and Gideon is still paying the price with his PTSD fire dreams. To assist the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, Gideon has agreed to monthly prison visits with Ellis Haines, a.k.a. the Weatherman. This time, a homicide case the FBI wants Haines to analyze sparks a chilling discovery: A new serial killer has struck, and he's lacing his crime scenes with hidden messages intended for Haines. 

They busted out of McAlester State Penitentiary—three escaped convicts going to ground in a world unprepared for anything like them.... Lamar Pye is prince of the Dirty White Boys. With a lion in his soul, he roars—for he is the meanest, deadliest animal on the loose.... Odell is Lamar's...

Could a nightmare be used as a murder weapon? That's the provocative question confronting Gurney in the thrilling new installment in this series of international bestsellers. The former NYPD star homicide detective is called upon to solve a baffling puzzle: Four people who live in different parts of the country and who seem to have little in common, report having had the same dream - a terrifying nightmare involving a bloody dagger with a carved wolf's head on the handle.

Drew Maclane was a star agent - until the day the killing had to stop. He withdrew, and for six years lived the life of a hermit in a monastery. But someone has tracked him down, leaving a trail of corpses...someone who knows all about him, who knows how to draw him back into that electrifying world where no one is as he seems, and where life's most horrifying and harrowing game is played.

When a local school is the target of a bomb threat, DI Louise Blackwell finds herself embroiled in her most personal case to date. Not only is her niece among the terrified pupils—there’s also a chilling note hidden under the device: Next time you won’t be so lucky, DI Blackwell… The explosion of a nearby caravan offers a connection…and a suspect. But when he hangs himself after interrogation, leaving another note promising more carnage, Blackwell fears there’s an accomplice.

When a woman in Bel Air dies of a rattlesnake bite, the case doesn’t seem to fit the usual purview of LAPD’s Special Cases Unit. But Carrie Holder was no ordinary LA woman. She was a member of the city's latest cult, the Church of the Gate, which counts Hollywood's movers and shakers among its devotees. Investigating the cult's secrets takes Detective Michael Gideon, his German shepherd K-9 partner, Sirius, and pit bull rescue Emily across Los Angeles's canyons, neighborhoods, and movie studio lots - but all the while, an even darker threat looms closer.

After seven months laying low in Ocean Beach, California, Seattle PI Leo Waterman has finally stopped looking over his shoulder - specifically, for the vengeful band of Washington white supremacists who blame Leo for blindsiding their big plans for America. Where better to disappear with his bodyguard, Gabe, than this laid-back stretch of San Diego heaven? But when Leo finds a boy’s body on the beach, he comes out of hiding to investigate. 

Antique salvager, counterfeiter, and former art forger Jota knows his newest commission pays suspiciously well, but it’s too easy to turn down. All he has to do is find an old clock that apparently has disappeared after being sold in the auction of a bankrupt estate. In Madrid’s El Rastro market, where whisper networks of shady and ambitious hustlers promise generous rewards for minimal favors, what sounds too good to be true usually is, but the last thing Jota is expecting to uncover is his own past.

Amateur private investigator Ash McKenna is home. After more than a year on the road he's ready to face the demons he ran away from in New York City. And he’s decided what he wants to do with his life: Become a private investigator, for real. Licensed and everything. No more working as a thug for hire. But within moments of stepping off the plane, Ginny Tonic, the drag queen crime lord who once employed him - and then tried to have him killed - asks to see him. One of her newest drag queen soldiers has gone missing and she wants Ash to find her.

Still mourning the murders of his wife and children, former Texas Ranger Arlo Baines now works security at a bazaar in Dallas. Grief-stricken, he’s invested his heart and hope in the welfare of Miguel - a street kid who’s become his surrogate son. But the wounds of a brutal past are hard to heal, especially when a new case threatens to rip them open all over again. Approached by a colleague now working for the DEA to investigate the seemingly random murders of prominent Latino businessmen, Arlo works to expose the common link.

Former anti-gang police unit star Loïc Le Goënec has had a chip on his shoulder ever since he was mysteriously kicked off the force. But when detectives uncover a vile ring of sexual deviance with ties to a city official, the commissioner calls his brilliant but rough-edged protégé back into action.

It's 1968, New York City is in a state of mayhem, and private eye Alex Novalis is flat broke. So he accepts a mundane missing persons gig from wealthy construction mogul Gabriel Kravitz, whose 18-year-old daughter, Lydia, has disappeared. The only lead is that Lydia had been sleeping with Jerry Pedrosian, a radical artist and known womanizer. But there are few clues, and everyone in Lydia's life seems to be hiding something... including her miniskirted best friend, Andrea Marshall, who Novalis is inconveniently attracted to.

"I’m being followed,” she said. “I think he wants to kill me.” When a panicked young woman slips her hand into his in 1960s Chinatown, just before a knife-wielding stalker attacks, private eye Alex Novalis finds his cherished hard-boiled persona threatened by a romantic streak that has a habit of getting him into trouble. Sandy Smollett is triple trouble - a stripper who comes on like the girl next door and has a way of bending the truth to suit any occasion. Novalis finds her irresistible.

When the security director of the posh Hotel California abruptly departs, assistant manager Am Caulfield steps into the role. The newbie hotel detective is quickly overwhelmed when a murder-mystery weekend descends on the hotel at the same time as a Bob Johnson convention (yes, the attendees are all named Bob Johnson) - and that’s before a bra thief strikes, a contractor leaps to his death, and two more dead bodies turn up. Mayhem has checked in to the Hotel California. So, as it turns out, has a murderer. Like the little Dutch boy, Am must try and plug one leak after another.

Finding murderers is just a day on the job for police captain Nadia Barka. But when a mutilated corpse is discovered in an old baptistery, she's faced with some difficult questions: Who left a young woman's body in a high-security museum in the middle of the night? And where is the victim's heart?

For generations, the urban legend of Granny Hatchet has plagued the quiet residential area of Suvikylä in northern Finland. As the story goes, this immortal killer murders her victims with a hatchet then buries the hearts in a potato field and eats them after they've rotted black. But not everyone is convinced it is just a story.

The first crime scene was the most disturbing. From the looks of it, the killer had dipped their fingers in the victim's blood and used it to write in dark red on the white wallpaper. Although the letters were smeared and uneven, Detective Niklas Steg had no trouble making out the message: "Reap the storm."

In a nation still recovering from the nuclear tragedies of forty years earlier, Clyde is working a dead-end guaranteed job at a diner, and Moonis is incarcerated in a Labor Camp for the Malcontented. But when Moonis's sister, Cecily, goes missing, the old friends escape their prisons to search for her in post-fallout America.