"The deadline was close and I knew now what London had sent me out here to do: define, infiltrate and destroy. And I couldn't do it just by standing in the way of the program Moscow was running. I'd have to get inside and blow it up from...
Farrell Brannigan, President of the National Californian bank, builds yet another bank at Sharnville, an up-and-coming town on the pacific coast. Using the brilliant know-how of a young electronics expert, Brannigan feels justified in calling his...
In the mode of The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, Ross Thomas’s best-selling novel to date, The Porkchoppers takes an inside look at corruption — this time in an American labor union. The result is Thomas’s toughest and most entertaining...
As originally published in “The Shadow Magazine,” January 15, 1935.
Bringing with it the inscrutable mystery and timelessness of its desert home, the Blue Sphinx, motionless on its pedestal, broods over the crime perils hovering above the...
Murder by the Sword Three people were dead, their heads bashed in, their bodies hacked with a samurai sword. All three victims were Japanese. The murder weapon was traced to Nick Martin, a veteran of Iwo Jima. Nick had spent fifteen pain-ridden...
THEY CALL HIM THE ANGEL OF DEATH. His real name is Michael Sullivan, professional hit man bound to the criminal underworld of the 1930s and an enigmatic idol to his adoring young sons. He’s also a man who knows that loyalties vanish in the dark...
A legendary and retired police chief lies in a New York hospital bed, visited by two strangers: the first is ex-cop-turned-PI Mike Hammer, whose life was saved more than once by the old man. To the detective, the chief gives a mysterious key. The...
For Will Innis and his daughter, Devlin, the loss was catastrophic. Every day for the past five years, they wonder where she is, if she is—Will’s wife, Devlin’s mother—because Rachael Innis vanished one night during an electrical storm on a...
At dawn one morning in 1933, an amateur dowsing team digging the banks of the Thames for precious metals unearths the body of a young woman with a priceless gold coin in her mouth and a missing toe. The case falls on Assistant Commissioner of...
In this chilling portrait of America’s Sin City, lady luck is just as likely to dispense cold hard cash as a cold-hearted killing.
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with...