Livres - Bibliographie

When a series of bizarre murders occur in London's notorious East End, Scotland Yard's Inspector Philemon Raft is called on to solve the crimes, but even he is powerless to explain why the victims are displayed in public places -- or why the killer insists on drilling burr holes in their skulls. With little to go on except the strange red dust found on the victims' palms, Raft must scour the city looking for an explanation. Aided only by his newly-appointed constable Freddie Crook, Raft's investigation takes him into London's most dark and dangerous places, where human predators wait to devour and destroy.

But Raft has an even bigger problem: a casual acquaintance is blackmailing him, and what she knows about his secrets could tear Raft's life to pieces.

The debut of a major new crime series from a celebrated Canadian author! In London, with Jack the Ripper's crimes still raw in the great city's memory, a well-known male prostitute is brutally murdered, the head neatly severed, and the body set on fire. Detective Inspector Phillip Devlin of Scotland Yard, mid-thirties and secretly gay, is called to the murder scene by plainclothes constable Freddie Collins, and soon both Collins and Devlin are caught in a web of intrigue as more savage murders occur. A Cold-Blooded Scoundrel resonates with the sights, sounds, and atmosphere of 1880s London. Witty and engaging, it unfolds the story of a man who must brave not only the killer but also his own inner demons in order to end the violence that is harrowing the city.

BOY MEETS BODY #1 in the PARTNERS in CRIME series Two young lives snuffed out, half a century a part, half a continent apart. The men who solve the murders also have to solve riddles in their own lives. Love is never easy. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can give your life to it. Sometimes, though, if you're not so lucky, you can give your life for it...

"Cards on the Table" by Josh Lanyon : Fifty years ago a glamorous Hollywood party ended in murder-the only clue a bloody Tarot card. Timothy North is trying to find out what happened that long ago summer's night, but when a Tarot card turns up pinned to his front door, the only person Tim can turn to for help is his ex-lover, Detective Jack Brady.

"Murder at the Heartbreak Hotel" by Sarah Black : Peter Moon, proprietor of a charming little get-away in the Land of the Midnight Sun, finds himself headed for less comfortable accommodations when he's accused of murder. Then his personal heartbreak showed up, fresh from six months in a Yukon River fish camp, determined to help.

Prodigy pianist Simon Duckworth has a dark past. After being violently raped when he was thirteen, he flees to London, ashamed and determined never to tell a soul. He gets a job at a Denmark Street music shop, but it stifles him. At the first opportunity, Simon answers an ad for a musician, an act that changes his life forever.

Stephen Abednego has seen the same ad. He arrives in London with little more than his ambitions and a sheaf of poems, but together, they’re enough to get him hired. Under their new manager’s watchful eye, Stephen falls for Simon—but Stephen deeply closeted, and Simon may be too emotionally scarred for a mature relationship.

With their manager’s help, their music rises, dragging them into the hectic world of superstardom, but success doesn’t come without a price. Each step out of the ennui and coal smoke of 1960s industrial London must be paid for in regret. With social convention standing between them and the whole world watching, Stephen and Simon discover that finding each other is not as easy as it seems.

Gangster Nino Moretti’s world is a series of contrasts between extreme wealth and abject poverty, an unstable existence punctuated by booze and bullets. For Nino, the gangster lifestyle is even more dangerous because he is a finnochio—a gay man—in a position of absolute power at the head of his own criminal organization.

When Nino rescues beautiful mob accountant Stanley Zadwadzki from a violent assault at the hands of sadistic rival gangster Big Frank O’Hara, both Nino and Stanley become hunted men. Stanley places himself under Nino’s protection as Nino’s accountant and unofficial companion. As a warning, Frank murders Nino’s office boy. In a quest for revenge, Nino tracks Frank to Little Italy, where the resulting confrontation forces him to shoot a bystander to protect Stanley. With a gang war looming, Nino must set aside his feelings and concentrate on asserting his superiority over Big Frank—or lose everything he holds most dear.

Morocco, 1941: a dead German courier, two stolen exit visas, an American drifter, a French policeman, a lot of sand, and a lot of blood. Think you know this story? Think again...

FREDERIK ABAROA, Resistance fighter and assassin, has come to Maarif to kill a young Nazi officer and steal the signed exit visas that he carries on his person. Maarif, a sweltering heap of wood-and-plaster houses, scabby palm trees and despair, is an important embarkation point for the thousands of refugees that daily flood into the city, hoping to find their way to some neutral country and to safety. It is here that JACOB PLENTY, an American drifter with a mysterious and painful past, runs the upscale brothel known as Paradise.

When Feldwebel Horst Stussel is murdered in Jake’s brothel, local police chief CAPTAIN NICOLAS RENARD suspects Jake’s involvement in the crime. Renard has loved Jake since their service in the famous legion étrangère during the Great War, but in this era of the concentration camp, the gas chamber and the infamous ‘pink triangle’ his love for the American dares not speak its name. Like Jake, Renard also has his secrets: his sorrow over the early loss of his mother, the son he illicitly conceived with a woman many years his senior, and the horrific sacrifice he made to save a compatriot from certain death.

Renard’s allegiance to the cause of the Free French pits him against the sadistic Nazi officer MAJOR DANZIG, a fanatic who excels at the arts of torture and interrogation; Danzig has come to Maarif in search of CHRISTOPHE “SALAZAR” PICARD – hero, Resistance leader and Jake Plenty’s former lover. Danzig will stop at nothing to uncover Picard’s whereabouts, to find him and destroy him and in so doing, strike a fatal blow at everything that Picard stands for.

With an Allied invasion of North Africa mere days away, Jake and Renard must combine their wits, their cunning and their courage to help Christophe Picard escape to America and freedom. In the midst of war and struggle, the two men are drawn into the fight of the century – and each other’s arms.

Set in Morocco in 1941, BECAUSE YOU DESPISE ME is the story of two men who find love amid a devastating war, each finding in the other the thing that completes him: courage, friendship, loyalty and the power of enduring love.

In 1942, Pearl Harbor has been bombed and the war is very much in evidence, but it would seem to have little to do with Frank Boyle, a respected Bronx born insurance investigator. He's a man who can keep secrets, and no one suspects that his boyhood friend—local mob boss Nicky Brooks—is his lover. When Brooks accidentally kills Frank's younger brother in a shootout, Frank must choose between his affair with Nicky and revenge for his brother's life.

After Frank betrays Nicky, police detective Sam Lipinski, a Bronx native who has long carried a torch for Frank, makes a move against the mob and lands squarely in the way of Nicky's plans. Sam smuggles Frank out of New York to keep him safe, and sets him up him in a small northeastern city. But there, a messy insurance investigation involving the Roarkes, who may or may not have killed their own mother for the insurance payout, places him in danger again. Dodging bullets, shady characters, and fallout from the war, Sam and Frank will need far more than luck on their side if they’re ever to see a loving future.

The Second World War rages: it touches Newfoundland in unprecedented ways, throwing spies and patriots together inside expatriate Jack Stolyes’s Heartache Café and forcing uncomplementary bedfellows into alliances. It’s all in a day’s work for Jack, whose introduction to the Island included corrupt cops, a murder on the doorstep of his restaurant, and more than one attempt on his life.

When exotic and alluring Egyptian diplomat Samuel Halim enters Jack’s small corner of the world, Jack’s life will change forever. Then, on his voyage home, Sam disappears along with the code key to decipher a Nazi radio command that will set Rommel’s troops in motion.

Jack finds himself with nothing to go on except a fragmented late-night phone call from Sam and a handful of disparate clues. In the teeming heat of Cairo—a city rife with romance, secrets, sex, and danger, where no one is who he seems and violent death waits around every shadowed corner—it’s up to Jack to find the new love of his life and deliver the code that will change the course of history.

The horrific murder of a local woman rocks Morristown, Mississipi. With her death, veteran police chief Eli Gallagher feels he’s failed his small town, despite trying his best to serve and protect everyone in his jurisdiction. Sometimes that’s harder than it looks, given that rich and poor don’t always get along, and life on the other side of the tracks can turn deadly.

By his side is conscientious young Deputy Stan Leach. Together they work to discover the killer. But as they uncover evidence, their personal lives begin to unravel. Eli’s long-distance boyfriend telephones saying he’s getting married to a woman. Stan learns that the man he helped shelter wants to move on. When the clues unveil a history of abuse, the two men pull together to bring the murdered woman justice and maybe find the answers to the other questions in their lives.

Jacob van Willingen arrives in a remote Romanian village aiming for a short visit. A member of the highly secretive Society for Psychical Research, Jacob has been charged with exterminating Caleb Donnithorn--but the society's intelligence about the reclusive nobleman is less than complete. As he studies his target, Van Willingen is drawn to Donnithorn, enthralled with the nobleman's alluring brides, three of society's most luminous geniuses gathered from the corners of Europe to create a fantastical machine: a resurrection engine that can capture a human soul at the moment of death.

Caleb Donnithorn represents everything that is evil in the world, but there is more to him than is initially apparent. What he knows about van Willingen is a truth so shocking it will shake the young scholar's world to its very foundations. Cast out from his friends and his beloved Society of Psychical Research, Jacob van Willingen will jettison everything he holds dear to remain with one whose love commands the highest price of all.

When former Indiana farm boy William Henry Rider goes on a bank robbing spree in Benedict Fouts's corner of Depression Era Illinois, it's up to Ben to bring him in. But Rider is no ordinary criminal. Famed for robberies that happen in the blink of an eye, Rider becomes a folk hero who steals from the rich and burns the mortgage papers of poor farmers teetering on the edge of financial ruin.

Intrigued to learn that Fouts has been assigned to his case, Rider approaches him in a darkened movie house with a unique proposition: “We’ll have ourselves a game of Cops and Robbers. I’ll run, and you catch me. The clock starts right now, Ben.”

Ben knows he’s the only one who can stop the Bureau from murdering Rider, but he’s soon struggling with another reason to chase the enigmatic fugitive.

The year is 1934, and disgraced federal agent Nathan Devereaux is escorting convicted felon John Banks to visit his dying mother. Banks is despondent, miserably ill with a heavy cold, and unenthusiastic about traveling by plane. It isn't a responsibility Devereaux wants, but something about the prisoner’s plight resonates with him.

Devereaux charters a plane to Wisconsin, hoping to get there before Banks's mother breathes her last. But a routine journey swiftly turns into a sojourn in hell when a violent winter storm forces the plane miles off course, and Banks’s seemingly bad cold turns out to be diphtheria.

Stranded many miles from the destination, Devereaux must find a way to save Banks's life without compromising the mission. Like Banks, Devereaux has secrets of his own, and the scope and purpose of his mission don't quite square with the stories he tells. Making matters worse, he is the only one standing between Banks and certain death, but even a federal agent can do only so much—especially an agent with blood on his hands.

J.S. Cook debuts haunted American expatriate Jack Stoyles, whose numb exile in an unexpected Atlantic outpost is suddenly brightened by a stranger who kisses him--and then dies. Betrayal, graft, a lost girl, and too many deaths. With good reason Jack called his place Heartache Cafe. This short story in eBook format part of the Partners in Crime #5 Committed to Memory print series.

When Dante di Salvatore, former prostitute and adopted son of one of Florence’s reigning nobles, is bitten by the ancient vampire goddess Lillith, his mortal life is over. Once enslaved by the vampire queen’s malign influence, Dante allies himself with Rouen, a young man of dazzling beauty and great influence who is enamored with Dante. But they cannot truly be together unless Dante changes Rouen into a vampire, and for Rouen, accepting the dark gift may ultimately cost him his immortal soul. Soon the great city of Florence will be taken to account for her sins as the streets are scourged of everything the fanatical preacher Serenola deems unnatural.

But many silent, mostly unseen creatures of the night are coming together from the disparate corners of the earth to do battle one last time against Serenola, evil disguised as good. What Dante does not realize is that he, above all others, holds the key to not only his own salvation, but the preservation of all of vampire kind—and perhaps even the human race.

South Carolina lawyer Calvin Amos is confident he can gain Thomas Basinger his freedom on appeal. Thom was convicted of a murder during an armed robbery gone bad. But Basinger’s case proves more difficult than Cal anticipated, and the battle he assumed he’d win turns into a devastating failure. Remorseful over the personal defeat, after Basinger is executed, Cal throws himself out of his office window.

Bizarrely, the fall doesn’t kill him. Even stranger, Thom Basinger rings Cal’s doorbell looking for a job. Both men are drawn to each other. Before long, the two forge a unique, heartfelt connection that transcends the boundaries of life and death.

Calvin Amos always imagined himself in possession of some great love or other. He didn’t know he had to die to find it.

Billionaire inventor Chase Gordon has just turned forty—and everything in his ordered little world is going to hell in an Hermès bag. His acerbic English butler Juliet Lavish has decided to retire. The humanitarian church founded by his late parents has suddenly gone broke—in the middle of the jungle—in Honduras. Lastly, NYPD detective Brian Schrade wants to use Chase’s palatial mansion to hide Walter Godfrey, a newspaper reporter who might know something about a recent rash of mob-related business deals. Part of the deal is the conniving, misanthropic Alec Pratt, son of a local newspaper mogul and unapologetic police informant who just might have a teensy weensy crush on Brian Schrade.

But Walter isn’t safe, not at Chase’s residence or anywhere else. His too-frequent forays into the city—against Brian Schrade’s advice—make him a target, and his strong attraction to Chase Gordon is setting him up for some serious heartbreak. When Chase goes to Honduras to investigate the state of his family’s failing fortunes, he adds another trouble to the long list: he's been set up for kidnapping.

In the tradition of novel noir, nothing is ever quite as it seems.

Novelist and war hero Tony Leonard sees private investigator Edwin Malory being mugged outside a seaman’s mission in downtown Los Angeles, so he takes him home and gives him clean clothes and access to a hot shower. It doesn’t take him long to discover Malory was hired by wealthy industrialist Linton Vanderbilt Stirling, the father of Tony’s estranged wife, Janet. The reason for this is simple: Tony’s father-in-law suspects him of drinking away his daughter’s personal fortune.

On a whim, Tony drops in on Janet one night and finds her naked, dead, and tied up, her skull beaten in. Horrified, Tony flees the scene, knowing that as her husband, he is the number one suspect in the killing. He sees only one way out. He needs to fake his own death.

And who better to send his “suicide note” to than Edwin Malory.