Titoli in Hard boiled

There’s bad stuff out there. Folks reckon things like vampires don't exist, but they does - Jock from the burger van told me. Plus I found an actual one of ’em, sleeping at the time in the back of a hearse I nicked that first morning. That's how me and Jock got to setting out freeing the world of ’em, using his bag o’ wooden stakes and special bottles of whisky. Course, I knowed that vampires didn’t exist, not when I stopped and done some thinking. And I knowed Jock had mental wossnames, what with his son falling off that roof and him reckoning them immigrants pushed him.

Crimes happen in a flash. Before you even know it, the shots have rung out, the jewels have been stolen, and the bodies are cooling on the floor. In this anthology, over eighty authors - including veterans such as Chuck Hogan, Ken Bruen, and Tasha Alexander - come together to tell tales of murder and mayhem, all in one thousand words or less. Dare to confront these fearful, furious tales, each offering a glimpse of the darkness lurking in the human heart.

Jeff Davis Swaine digs up evidence for a Raleigh, North Carolina, trial law firm. When a client comes home to find his McMansion burglarized - and his new wife's dog dead in the kitchen - the man suspects his ex-wife. But this is someone far more dangerous. From a stolen minivan, washed-up jazz bassist Leonard Noblac is performing his "perfect jazz album of felonies" to punish the zeros in the soulless suburb of Rocky Falls.

It's 1968, New York City is in a state of mayhem, and private eye Alex Novalis is flat broke. So he accepts a mundane missing persons gig from wealthy construction mogul Gabriel Kravitz, whose 18-year-old daughter, Lydia, has disappeared. The only lead is that Lydia had been sleeping with Jerry Pedrosian, a radical artist and known womanizer. But there are few clues, and everyone in Lydia's life seems to be hiding something... including her miniskirted best friend, Andrea Marshall, who Novalis is inconveniently attracted to.

For his entire adult life, ex-criminal Will Daniels has been running from his past. Now, in the wake of his son’s gruesome death, he’ll turn around and embrace it. After learning his boy got his head half blown off while helping a couple of punks rob a bank, Will tries - oh, how he tries - to just let the police handle the investigation. But as legal channels fall well short and Will’s helpless fury mounts, it’s only a matter of time before he dishes out a more personal brand of justice.

Following his ordination as a priest, Father Luis Chavez returns to the mean streets of his youth, hoping to put his past behind him. But the brutal murder of a worker in Ventura County's vast farm fields compels Luis to return to his criminal roots in order to unravel a massive conspiracy. Teaming up with Michael Story, an ambitious Los Angeles deputy DA, Chavez goes undercover as a farm laborer to bring down an immense human-trafficking ring tied to one of California's most prominent and powerful families.

He is a man alone, a drifter haunting the back roads and highways of America. Every town he leaves behind preserves but a glimmer of him, the cool, handsome man with the teardrop scar whose presence fades with the sunlight. But all that changes when a brutal assault forces him to play Good Samaritan for a beautiful young woman, placing him squarely in the crosshairs of a vengeful ex-con. Caught between duty to his fellow man and the anonymity of life on the road, the Samaritan struggles to resist the forces drawing him into a shadowy world of violence, intrigue, and deception.

After seven months laying low in Ocean Beach, California, Seattle PI Leo Waterman has finally stopped looking over his shoulder - specifically, for the vengeful band of Washington white supremacists who blame Leo for blindsiding their big plans for America. Where better to disappear with his bodyguard, Gabe, than this laid-back stretch of San Diego heaven? But when Leo finds a boy’s body on the beach, he comes out of hiding to investigate.

Somebody’s gunning for Josh Michaels. They must be. There’s no other reason why a stranger would run him off the road, taunt him with a “thumbs-down”, and leave him to die. Josh may have made some messy mistakes in the past, but who’s suddenly decided that he’s worth more dead than alive? As more and more near-fatal accidents befall him, there can be no denying it: he’s got a bull’s-eye on his back. But why? Is it revenge? Mistaken identity? Or is it something far more insidious?

On a blustery San Francisco day, six strangers take shelter inside a popular neighborhood restaurant - never imagining they have only minutes left to live. The gunman is merciless, and the ensuing carnage is the worst the city has witnessed in decades. It is a random act of violence no one could have foreseen. Unless it wasn’t random at all.… Pregnant with her first child, homicide lieutenant Jane Candiotti is under strict doctor’s orders to take it easy. But when a mass shooting claims the life of her teenage nephew, all bets are off.

After the brutal murder of an art gallery owner, the beautiful and mysterious artist Holly Troy seems to be the key to finding out what really happened on the night of the homicide. Unfortunately, Holly also suffers from dissociative identity disorder, and many of her personalities come straight from classical mythology, from the powerful Cronos and Pandora to the fickle Fates. Holly has no idea who she was the night of the crime - whether she witnessed anything, or even if she was the killer herself. Homicide detective Orson Cheever must unravel the complex labyrinth of Holly’s mind before he can find the truth.

In a nation still recovering from the nuclear tragedies of forty years earlier, Clyde is working a dead-end guaranteed job at a diner, and Moonis is incarcerated in a Labor Camp for the Malcontented. But when Moonis's sister, Cecily, goes missing, the old friends escape their prisons to search for her in post-fallout America.

Antique salvager, counterfeiter, and former art forger Jota knows his newest commission pays suspiciously well, but it’s too easy to turn down. All he has to do is find an old clock that apparently has disappeared after being sold in the auction of a bankrupt estate. In Madrid’s El Rastro market, where whisper networks of shady and ambitious hustlers promise generous rewards for minimal favors, what sounds too good to be true usually is, but the last thing Jota is expecting to uncover is his own past.

Detective Tess McCrae investigates a grisly crime scene in the ghost town of Credo, Arizona. The evidence suggests a cartel drug hit. But Tess, with a nearly faultless photographic memory, sees what others might miss: This is no drug killing. Someone went to gruesome lengths to cover their tracks. The killer’s trail leads from Tucson to California - from anti-government squatters to the heights of wealthy society. As Tess follows the trail of gore and betrayal, perfect and indelible in her memory, she uncovers far more than one man’s murder and solves much more than one isolated crime.

The Bentheims of Berlin take in Till Anschütz, an orphan on the run, who quickly befriends 12-year-old Max. The boys are intrigued by the office where Max’s cold, distant father, Xavier Bentheim, writes his horror novels. And when they get up the nerve to explore, Max and Till are truly horrified by what they discover behind a hidden door.… Till awakens strapped to a gurney. His belly is burning, and a young woman with dead eyes flicks her forked tongue against his face. "We’ve modified you - you’ll like it," a familiar voice purrs.…

Ten years after the death of patriarch Xavier Bentheim, long-estranged Till Anschütz returns to Berlin for the wedding of the family’s youngest daughter. Till carries with him the disturbing memories and macabre secrets surrounding Xavier’s death. And although he doesn’t know it, his return to Berlin has set in motion a sinister plan.

For generations, the urban legend of Granny Hatchet has plagued the quiet residential area of Suvikylä in northern Finland. As the story goes, this immortal killer murders her victims with a hatchet then buries the hearts in a potato field and eats them after they've rotted black. But not everyone is convinced it is just a story.

The first crime scene was the most disturbing. From the looks of it, the killer had dipped their fingers in the victim's blood and used it to write in dark red on the white wallpaper. Although the letters were smeared and uneven, Detective Niklas Steg had no trouble making out the message: "Reap the storm."

Former anti-gang police unit star Loïc Le Goënec has had a chip on his shoulder ever since he was mysteriously kicked off the force. But when detectives uncover a vile ring of sexual deviance with ties to a city official, the commissioner calls his brilliant but rough-edged protégé back into action.

Finding murderers is just a day on the job for police captain Nadia Barka. But when a mutilated corpse is discovered in an old baptistery, she's faced with some difficult questions: Who left a young woman's body in a high-security museum in the middle of the night? And where is the victim's heart?