Ella Young immigrated to the United States in 1925 at the age of 58, disillusioned by Ireland’s civil war. In America she found a revitalizing natural beauty and a wide circle of friends among the artists and bohemians of the mid-century. Through her stories, beliefs, and poetry, she restored people’s connection with the sacred in nature. She taught that the land holds spirits, that you can talk to a mountain, and that humans are part of the planet, not here to dominate it. This connection...

An amoral young tramp. A beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband. A problem that has only one, grisly solution -- a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve.First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a classic of the roman noir. It established James M. Cain as a major novelist with an unsparing vision of America's bleak underside, and wa...

Grieving widow or black widow?The day Joan Medford buried her husband was a fateful one—because before the day was out she'd meet the two men who would change her life forever. Forced to take a job waitressing to support herself and her child, Joan finds herself caught between the handsome young schemer whose touch she comes to crave and the wealthy older man whose touch repels her…but who otherwise would make a tempting husband number two. It's a classic Cain triangle —br...

Tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful, Double Indemnity gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1936, this novel reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.Performed by James Naughton

Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter.Out of these elements, Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less tha...

Detective Matt Cordell was happily married once, and gainfully employed, and sober. But that was before he caught his wife cheating on him with one of his operatives and took it out on the man with the butt end of a .45. Now Matt makes his home on the streets of New York and his only companions are the city’s bartenders. But trouble still knows how to find him, and when Johnny Bridges shows up from the old neighborhood, begging for Matt’s help, Cordell finds himself drawn into a case full ...

"Charlesgate Confidential is terrific." —Stephen KingA sharp and funny tale of a daring art heist gone wrong—inspired by the same real-life, still-unsolved crime depicted in the Netflix hit series This Is a Robbery.A group of criminals in 1946 pull off the heist of the century, stealing a dozen priceless works of art from a Boston museum. But while the thieves get caught, the art is never found. Forty years later, the last...

Nathan Heller, star of MWA Grandmaster Max Allan Collins’ most acclaimed series of novels (more than 1 million copies sold to date!), comes to Hard Case Crime for the first time in an all-new thriller drawn from the pages of history. A millionaire’sson is kidnapped and private eye Heller is called in to help. But when half of the record $600,000 ransom goes missing, Heller must wade through a morass of deception and depravity to blow the lid off a notorious crime whoseconsequ...

Hospitalized after a liaison with another man's wife ends in violence, Paul Cole has just one goal: to rebuild his shattered life. But with his memory damaged, the police hounding him, and no way even to get home, Paul's facing steep odds—and a bleak fate if he fails. This final, never-before-published novel by three-time Edgar Award winner Donald E. Westlake is a noir masterpiece, a dark and painful portrait of a man's struggle against merciless forces that threaten to strip him of his ve...

From the dark imagination of New York Times bestselling novelist Daniel Kraus - co-author with Guillermo del Toro of THE SHAPE OF WATER (which as a film won the Academy Award for Best Picture) - comes a Halloween crime story that's like nothing you've ever heard before.WHEN TRICK OR TREATBECOMES LIFE OR DEATHAt the end of Yellow Street, in a ruined junkyard of a house, an angry outcast hatches a scheme to take revenge for all the w...

Crime fiction readers know Quarry—the ruthless killer for hire from Max Allan Collins’ acclaimed novels—but where did Quarry’s story start? For the first time ever, the bestselling author of Road to Perdition takes us back to the beginning, revealing the never-before-told story of Quarry’s first job: infiltrating a college campus and eliminating a professor whose affair with one of his beautiful young students is the least of his sins.

"Hearing the click behind him, Parker threw his glass straight back over his right shoulder and dove off his chair to the left."When a job looks like amateur hour, Parker walks away. But even a squad of seasoned professionals can't guarantee against human error in a high-risk scam. Can an art dealer with issues unload a truck of paintings with Parker's aid? Or will the heist end up too much of a human interest story, as luck runs out before Parker can get in on the score?