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NoirNovels.com - A unique repository for all things noir
American Noir |
American Tabloid | James Ellroy 1958 - America is about to emerge into a bright new age - an age that will last until the 1000 days of John F.Kennedy`s presidency. Three men move beneath the glossy surface of power; men allied to the makers and shakers of the era. Peter Bondurant - Howard Hughes`s right-hand man, Jimmy Hoffa`s hitman. Kemper Boyd - employed by J. Edgar Hoover to infiltrate the Kennedy clan. Ward Littell, a man seeking redemption in Bobby Kennedy`s drive against organised crime. The festering discontent of the age that burns brightly in these men`s hearts will go into supernova as the Bay of Pigs ends in calamity, the Mob clamours for payback and the 1000 days ends in brutal quietus in 1963. |
Dick Contino`s Blues | James Ellroy Dick Contino - 50s accordion player, a star in the making, is destroyed by a draft-dodging scandal. His life is on the skids until he comes up with the idea of resurrecting his career with a fake kidnapping scam. Meanwhile, a serial killer is on the looses in Los Angeles...a killer who is closer to Contino than he suspects - a killer who wants in on the kidnap, for real... Plus five previously unpublished short stories. Read review. |
Fight Club | Chuck Palahniuk Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter, and dark, anarchic genius and it`s only the beginning of his plans for revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth. Read review. |
Survivor | Chuck Palahniuk Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the creedish death cult, has comandeered a Boeing 747, emptied of passengers, in order to tell his story to the plane`s black box before it crashes. Brought up by the repressive cult and, like all creedish younger sons, hired out as a domestic servant, Tender finds himself suddenly famous when his fellow cult members all commit suicide. As media messiah he ascends to the very top of the freak-show heap before finally and apocalyptically spiralling out of control. Read review. |
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead | Michael Ledwidge Michael Ledwidge writes carefully plotted capers that revolve around first and second generation Irish American immigrants who populate the five boroughs of New York City. In Before the Devil Knows You`re Dead, Manhattan cop John Coglin shoots a drug dealer in self-defense and finds himself on trial for a racially biased murder. The Powers that Be are going to make an example of Coglin; Civil Rights leaders, community activists, and career-furthering politicians all want his head. |
Tough Luck | Jason Starr In Jason Starr`s fifth novel, Tough Luck, luck is at a premium and Mickey Prada has none of it. His mother is dead, his father suffers from Alzheimer`s, he`s put upon and intimidated by a mafia bully, a local bookie is into him for $2000, he`s involved in a robbery in which an accomplice is murdered, he gets fired from his job, the girl of his dreams hates him and he smells like yesterday`s mackerel. Read review. |
Matchstick Men | Eric Garcia In novels where con-artists are the main characters the author usually exhausts himself and the reader`s credulity by struggling to keep the grifters one step ahead of the marks and by attempting to outsmart the readers until the very last page. What usually results is a Gordian Knot of a plot and a reader taking notes on the margins of the pages in order to keep up. In Matchstick Men, Eric Garcia has written a tale of two con men whose schemes and chicanery keep them busy in the work-a-day world of skullduggery: college students trumped by crooked card tricks, old ladies swindled by wayward roofers?no one is going to get tricked out of the Crown Jewels nor will the reader bump into Orson Welles cheating at chemin de fer in Monte Carlo. Read review. |
Shot | Jenny Stiler In her two previous books, Easy Money and Iced, Jenny Siler describes pseudo-government agencies run amok in the rugged sprawl of the modern west, where post-hippie weirdness and blue-collar attitudes co-exist until one of Siler`s strong-willed heroines barrels through with a pick-up truck full of justice and revenge. In Siler`s latest thriller, Shot, the sins and regrets of the past return to haunt both heroes and villains. After losing a child to birth defects, Lucy Green`s marriage is winding down. Her husband Carl is withdrawn and spends most of his time working. Lucy spends her time alone, painting in her prairie Mansion paid for by her husband's job at Bioflux, a biotech research firm. The plot turns from rainy afternoon melodrama to bullet-dodging, lead storm intensity after Carl calls an old friend with the lure of a big news story and then dies in an auto accident on a lonely Washington State road. Kevin Burns, Carl`s friend and Lucy`s old flame in high school, needs to rekindle his television journalist career with a big score. He sees the call as a vehicle for his professional come back; and with Carl dead, perhaps another chance to have Lucy in his life. After Carl`s home office is burglarized simple coincidences become complex subterfuge. Read review. |
Scavenger Hunt | Robert Ferrigno Robert Ferrigno`s seventh novel, Scavenger Hunt is the story of artistic triumph and the redemption of the innocent, posing as a murder mystery. Slap magazine reporter Jimmy Gage uncovers the story of a lifetime while participating in a scavenger hunt in his hometown of L.A. He meets fallen film director Garrett Walsh, a two-time Oscar winning boy wonder and convicted murderer who, now out on parole, is trying to prove his innocence in the rape and murder of Heather Grimm, a California beach-bunny who makes friends way too easily. With his latest project, Fall Guy, the most dangerous screenplay in Hollywood, Walsh hopes to show he was set up for murder and asks Gage for help. Curious, game, and always in need of copy, Gage agrees. Read review. |
Derailed | James Siegel James Siegel`s debut novel Derailed is a psychological thriller that relies on scams, blackmail, trust, betrayal, identity-mistaken and falsified, and revenge served as cold as the recipe calls for. The story begins when a civilian writing instructor at Attica State prison is given in installments a story that twists with scams, blackmail, betrayal and sounds exactly like what happened to him several years before when evil disguised proved too tempting to resist. Read review. |
Money For Nothing | Donald E. Westlake For seven years Josh Redmont has been receiving $1000 a month, deposited into his checking account by an unknown source. Redmont gladly accepts the money without questioning its source. Eventually, Josh will have to earn it. Read review. |
The Angel Of Montague Street | Norman Green In Norman Green`s second novel The Angel of Montague Street the only acknowledgment returning Vietnam War veteran Silvano Iurata receives are cursory hellos and warnings that his life is in danger. Though jungle warfare can be hell, so can the streets of Brooklyn circa 1973 when a low level Mafiosi wants to do to you what the North Vietnamese guerrillas couldn`t. Read review. |
Cypress Grove | James Sallis Like much of life, a murder investigation consists mainly of plodding along, circling back and waiting, considerably more cleric than high adventure. So opines Turner, the one name ex-detective in James Sallis` latest noir, Cypress Grove. Read review. |
Done For A Dime | David Corbett David Corbett's Done for a Dime takes noir conventions and arranges them so flawlessly and artfully into the narrative that it takes a while for the reader to realize that he has seen it all before. Corbett is so skillful a writer that the material doesn't matter; he has, as Ezra Pound admonished, made it new. Without donning a fedora and jawing his way through the mean streets around Oakland, California, with the tough guy jargon of a noir character on steroids, Corbett is able to incorporate into Done for a Dime a seemingly open-and-shut murder investigation that leads to much larger fish; the seamy world of jazz nightclubs; hidden paternity; politicians in cahoots with anyone who could line their pockets; good cops who walk the line between right and wrong in order to get the job done; and a good old-fashioned land grab. Read review. |
Too Much Of Nothing | Michael Scott Moore Eric Sperling is a restless spirit. Really. Murdered in the early 1980's, Eric is a nefesh, a human spirit in need of purification before ending his purgatory on earth. Fifteen years later he still wanders the California beach town of Calaveras, a suburb of Los Angeles, studying Jewish mysticism and trying to figure out how to move to the next spiritual level. Eric is angry, bitter, and unable to put his wrongful death at the hands of Tom Linden behind him. Read review. |
Buzz Monkey | Sam Hill Have you ever done anything for the helluvit, for no other reason than for the thrill of not knowing how an action you have taken might turn out? Ever place yourself in harm's way just to get a rush? Shoplift, run a stoplight, or commit a crime with a loaded weapon even though you have a wallet full of cash? If you have, you're a buzz monkey, a person addicted to the adrenaline rush that's produced any time you jump into the unknown with no guarantees on your personal safety or anything else. Read review. |
The Long Count | Frank Megna Johnny DeMarco is getting his brains scrambled in the fifth round of his comeback fight. Pushing 40 and after five years of retirement, The Brooklyn Bomber returned to the ring to bring Mary back to life. By some miracle, he wins. Reporters write about the stunner in the New York newspapers mentioning that Johnny has been working as a PI. One person who reads about the fight is Morris Steinberg, an old high school buddy, who is now a mogul in the music industry. It's been over 20 years since they last spoke, but Morris is a man with some ugly secrets in his closet and a missing daughter. Johnny's comeback puts into motion a series of events during the final weeks of 1999, sending him on an odyssey through an underworld more terrifying than the Mafia and into a confrontation with a sinister organization known as The Ninth Society. Read review. |
Saw Red | Bob Truluck Duncan Sloan plays as hard as the people he comes up against in his return in Bob Truluck's second novel Saw Red. Sloan is the kind of Florida PI whose career staggers somewhere between chasing down repos and working for big money clients. His office is shabby, he has no woman, and if he says he'll slap you for not following directions, like putting a gun down when he asks, he'll slap you hard. In Sloan's world, nobody's out till they're dead, in this game. Read review. |
| Sky Full Of Sand | Rick Demarinis When bank VIP Clive Renseller gets his freak on one fateful night he doesn't count on it being his last. His death opens the door for Uriah Walkinghorse, a thoughtful bodybuilder on the decline, to plumb the depths drug smuggling, the philosophy of money, race, and the nature of love and family on the porous U.S.-Mexican border where evil on one side of the Rio Grande can cross over and become a virtue on the other. Rick DeMarinis's eighth novel, "Sky Full of Sand", is a noir so integrated into the time and place which it depicts that it is an incredible naturalistic narrative of lives that might be too incredible to believe, yet you do. Read review. |
The Last Autopsy | Norbert Zaenglein Coming soon! |
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