It’s the year 2307. For 250 years, the Great Division has held firm—an impenetrable wall made of frozen light that separates two radically different worlds. In the Kingdom, loved-based emotion is seen as weak and disgusting. Its citizens, transformed by a brain-altering process called PowerTurn, wield sharpened intellect and unbridled ambition, stripped of emotional attachment and unchecked by discipline. On the other side is the PLD, where the Full-Merge process has fused heart and mind i...

The term "Artificial Intelligence" has been around since the 1950s, but a lot has changed since then. Today, AI is referenced in the news, books, movies, and TV shows, and the exact definition is often misinterpreted. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning For Dummies provides a clear introduction to AI and how it’s being used today. Inside, you’ll get a clear overview of the technology, the common misconceptions surrounding it, and a fascinating look at its applications in...

It’s San Francisco, 1928, and Sam Spade is a wisecracking, womanising Private Investigator. Missing husbands and unfaithful wives are his usual stock-in-trade, but when the beautifully distressed Miss Wonderley calls he gets involved in a dangerous caper most people would run a mile from. Miss Wonderley asks Sam’s partner, Miles Archer, to shadow Floyd Thursby, whom she maintains has kidnapped her sister. But then Archer is shot dead, and Miss Wonderley’s story turns out to be a lie – just...

A collection of seven ingenious full-cast thrillers and crime dramas by Rod BeachamActor, dramatist and founding member of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, Rod Beacham wrote over 15 plays for BBC Radio. This collection comprises seven crime dramas first broadcast on Radio 4’s ‘Saturday Night Theatre’ strand between 1980 and 1987, ranging in tone from tense whodunnits to light-hearted comedy thrillers.The Inter-City Contract – A...

The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora Charles, New York’s coolest crime-solving couple.Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later, a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick’s client.Nick can no more resist the case than a morning cocktail or a good fight, and soon he and Nora are caught in a complicated web of confused identiti...

Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett's tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.A one-t...

The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op's most bizarre cases and a tautly crafted masterpiec...

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

When Sam Spade gets drawn into the Maltese Falcon case, we know what to expect: straight talk, hard questions, no favors, and no way for anyone to get underneath the protective shell he wears like a second skin. We know that his late partner, Miles Archer, was a son of a bitch; that Spade is sleeping with Archer’s wife, Iva; that his tomboyish secretary, Effie Perine, is the only innocent in his life. What we don’t know is how Spade became who he is. Spade & Archer completes the p...

Here's Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer in their roughest and readiest—a double-strength shot of sex, violence, and action that is vintage Spillane all the way. It's a tough-guy mystery to please even the most bloodthirsty of fans!

A hitchhiker stumbles to his knees on the side of a dark road. Private detective Lew Archer stops his car. When he gets to the young man, Archer realizes that he has stumbled into a mess—for the hitchhiker is dying of a gunshot wound.In a matter of hours, Archer is suspected by the law, hired by a target-shooting trucking magnate, and propositioned by an adulterer’s wife. A hijacked truck full of liquor and an evidence box full of marijuana, $20,000 from a big-time bank heist by a ...

No dame is pretty with a gun in her hand. But at least this one was alive. The last time Mike Hammer met up with a blonde she ended up dead, and Hammer inherited a war with the Mob. As he digs deeper, he discovers that about fifteen years ago the Mafia had been double crossed. Now, people are dying because of it and the girl with the gun is a crucial witness in the case. While Hammer's enemies are searching the city for him, he is ready to go after them. Along the way, he'll find out just ...