Isaac Asimov, einer , hat auch Acht

Die „Schwarzen Witwer" sind keine Bösewichte, sondern ehrbare Herren, die sich einmal im Monat zu einem gemütlichen Beisammensein zusammenfinden. Dieses Treffen zeichnet sich durch zwei Besonderheiten aus. Erstens darf - und das ist eigentlich der Sinn dieser Veranstaltung - keine Frau an diesem Essen teilnehmen. Zweitens wird bei dieser Zusammenkunft jedesmal eine geheimnisvolle Angelegenheit aufgeklärt, beispielsweise die Geschichfe des Mannes, der immer die Wahrheit sagte, oder warum ein Faulpelz seine Frau ermordete. Obwohl die Schwarzen Witwer mit der größten Begeisterung versuchen, jeden Fall zu losen, sind sie jedoch immer wieder auf die Hilfe ihres Kellners Henry angewiesen, der wie ein zweiter Sherfock Holmes oder Hercule Poirot jedes noch so tiefsinnige Geheimnis entschleiert.

Titel der amerikanischen Originalausgabe TALES OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS

Deutsche Übersetzung von Willi Thaler

Sniper opens in October 1998 near Buffalo, NY. A man is alone in the dark in a forest. He clutches an assault rifle and is thinking about his mission. “You can cut holes in the fences around the death camps,” he thinks. “A trickle of relief in the abortion holocaust. It is your duty to do it.” He nestles the rifle into his shoulder and shoots at his target through the back window of a house, then flees. Barnett Sepia, a doctor who provides abortions, is fatally wounded.

The shooter is James Kopp, the son of a Marine, who came to embrace the pro-life cause and ultimately the notion of “justifiable homicide”: against abortion providers. Kopp fancies himself a lone wolf in the movement; a celibate man driven to “defend the unborn.” He is nicknamed “Atomic Dog” in the movement and helps orchestrate assaults on abortion clinics. As the story unfolds, he becomes the central figure in an international manhunt for multiple shootings in Canada. On the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list, Kopp flees to Mexico, Ireland, and France. Award-winning journalist Jon wells followed Kopp’s footsteps, traveled to his hometown, and interviewed investigators in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and France to tell this gripping detective story and dark psychological drama.

A new generation of crime writers has broadened the genre of crime fiction, creating more human stories of historical realism, with a stronger emphasis on character and the psychology of crime.

This superb anthology of 12 novellas encompasses over 4,000 years of our dark, criminal past, from Bronze Age Britain to the eve of the Second World War, with stories set in ancient Greece, Rome, the Byzantine Empire, medieval Venice, seventh-century Ireland and 1930s' New York.

A Byzantine icon painter, suddenly out of work when icons are banned, becomes embroiled in a case of deception; Charles Babbage and the young Ada Byron try to crack a coded message and stop a master criminal; and New York detectives are on the lookout for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The detached yet penetrating account of the savage and senseless murder of a family.

With the publication of this book, Capote permanently ripped through the barrier separating crime reportage from serious literature. As he reconstructs the 1959 murder of a Kansas farm family and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, Capote generates suspense and empathy.

In this book Margaret Millar returns to the wry mixture of imaginative farce and queasy horror which first won the hearts of mystery fans. It has a firm, fast plot and a rich variety of characters that are as real as they are amusing.

They are presented first through the eyes of Isobel Seton, a candid and witty New Yorker who has bought skis and is riding on Sno-bus to a Sno-lodge in the wilds of Quebec in the middle of a snowstorm. Other passengers include a burlesque artist, a refugee English poet whose genius is to madness near allied, an aging divorcee who acts as his patroness, a handsome young couple who are reveling masochistically in a frustrated honeymoon, a married pair who wish somebody had frustrated their honeymoon, a precocious sophomore who is making an avocation of protecting her mild and mannerly father against the perils of sex, and a handsome young-old man who says he’s so wicked that nobody believes him until he proves it.

There’s a bus-driver, too, who stops the car in the middle of nowhere, walks away into the blizzard and doesn’t come back. The account of what happens to the stranded ski-party in that decayed wilderness chateau during the mad night that follows will provide mystery fans with the kind of evening that they are fanatical about. There is Miss Rudd, the elderly owner of the place, playfully free with the shears, the bus-driver’s coat discovered under the coal, the grizzly discovery in the snowbound front yard along toward morning, and other more hair-raising adventures as the tempo rises. This is the swiftest and most entertaining of Mrs. Millar’s contributions to hairbreadth-escape literature.

After his life spirals out of control, a young man navigates a world of juggalos, transients, and petty criminals with Shane, an enigmatic small-time drug dealer with a penchant for body modification.

"Zero zero zero" flour is the finest, whitest available. "Zero zero zero" is also the nickname among narcotraffickers for the purest, highest quality cocaine on the market. And it is the title of Roberto Saviano’s unforgettable exploration of how the cocaine trade knits the world into its dark economy and imposes its own vicious rules and moral codes on its armies and, through them, on us all.

Saviano’s , his explosive account of the Neapolitan mob, the Camorra, was a worldwide publishing sensation. It struck such a nerve with the Camorra that Saviano has lived with twenty-four hour police protection in the shadow of death threats for more than seven years. During this time he has become intimate with law enforcement agencies around the world. Saviano has broadened his perspective to take in the entire global corporate” entity that is the drug trade in cooperation with law enforcement officials, who have fed him information and sources and used him to guide their own thinking and tactics. Saviano has used this extraordinary access to feed his own groundbreaking reportage.

The result is a truly amazing and harrowing synthesis of intimate literary narrative and geopolitical analysis of one of the most powerful dark forces in the global economy. In , Saviano tracks the shift in the cocaine trade’s axis of power, from Colombia to Mexico, and relates how the Latin American cartels and gangs have forged alliances, first with the Italian crime syndicates, then with the Russians, Africans, and others. On the one hand, he charts an astonishing increase in sophistication and diversification as these criminal entities diversify into many other products and markets. On the other, he reveals the threat of violence to protect and extend power and how the nature of the violence has grown steadily more appalling.

Saviano is a journalist of rare courage and a thinker of impressive intellectual depth and moral imagination, able to see the connections between far-flung phenomena and bind them into a single epic story. Most drug-war narratives feel safely removed from our own lives; Saviano offers no such comfort. As heart racing as it is heady, is a fusion of a variety of disparate genres into a brilliant new form that can only be called .

The sexes battle, the mind feuds with emotions it cannot control and crime extorts and strikes and kills but it does not pay in this collection of stories by Rex Stout at the outset of his celebrated career in mystery and suspense. Again and again in these tales taken from the pages of pulps that originally published him — from popular magazines like the and the — the creator of the immortal Nero Wolfe proves himself to be the master of the sudden reversal and unexpected revelation as he probes the thwarted heart, the wounded soul and the criminal intelligence.

When the naked, mutilated body of a man is found in a Notting Hill graveyard and the police investigation led by Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster and his colleague Detective Superintendent Heather Jenkins yields few results, a closer look at the corpse reveals that what looked at first glance like superficial knife wounds on the victim's chest is actually a string of carved letters and numbers, an index number referring to a file in city archives containing birth and death certificates and marriage licenses. Family historian Nigel Barnes is put on the case. As one after another victim is found in various locations all over London, each with a different mutilation but the same index number carved into their skin, Barnes and the police work frantically to figure out how the corresponding files are connected. With no clues to be found in the present, Barnes must now search the archives of the past to solve the mystery behind a string of 100-year-old murders. Only then will it be possible to stop the present series of gruesome killings, but will they be able to do so before the killer ensnares his next victim? Barnes, Foster, and Jenkins enter a race against time - and before the end of the investigation, one of them will get much too close for comfort.

Dan Waddell is a journalist and author who lives in west London with his son. He writes about the media and -popular culture, and has published ten non-fiction books, including the bestselling Who Do You Think You Are?, which tied in with the BBC TV series. This is his first novel.

Genealogist Nigel Barnes's second case leads him into the dark heart of the Mormon church and a gruesome, century-old secret.

Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster is called to a homicide at the home of a single mother in Queens Park, London. Her throat has been cut from ear to ear and her body dumped in the garden. Her daughter and only child, Naomi, who has just turned fourteen that day, is missing. As the hours tick by, the feeling grows among Foster's colleagues that this is most likely becoming a double-murder inquiry. With nothing in the present to indicate a motive, Foster decides to delve into the dead woman's past only to find out she does not have one. He calls on genealogist Nigel Barnes. The trail takes Barnes back to late Victorian England where it abruptly ends with a young couple who came from the United States to England. Nigel's quest takes him on trip through the violent history of the Mormon church as he and Foster race to solve a shameful, long-kept secret that is about to have bloody repercussions in the present, and for which someone is seeking vengeance.

Dan Waddell delivers another gritty, suspenseful mystery that will keep readers guessing until the last page.

In An Easeful Death, someone is killing beautiful young women and taking extraordinary risks to carefully pose their painted bodies in public places. The first is bronze, then silver who will be gold? Detective Sergeant Stevie Hooper, young, hard-edged and newly seconded to the Serious Crime Squad, finds herself haunted by increasingly disturbing flashbacks as the bizarre case unfolds. And, as she closes in on the killer, the carefully drawn line between her professional and personal life becomes increasingly blurred, till she doesnt know who can be trusted.

ianca thought of Katy Enigmawould Katy go with this man? He had soft brown eyes and, despite his strange nose, his face looked kind. He smiled. Bianca placed her hand in his and felt him shiver. She didn't know why, it wasn't cold at all. --- When the body of 11-year-old Bianca Webster is found dumped, it is soon clear to Detective Sergeant Stevie Hooper that the murder is connected to a pedophile internet site called the Dream Team. Another murder leads her to suspect that she might have a vigilante on her hands. Cyber technology spins at the heart of this thriller, with its many unexpected plot twists. Katy Enigma, Lolita, Harum Scarum just who or what lies beneath these internet nicknames? Stevie finds herself racing against time to discover the identities before another child is taken.

It’s tough being a Detective Senior Sergeant in the Sex Crimes unit. DSS Stevie Hooper is fighting to balance the seamier side of being a cop with her role as a mother—and her latest case is not going to make it any easier. It starts with a deserted house, an abandoned baby, and an elderly neighbor who has the answers but cannot speak. Then the body of a woman turns up in the river with its limbs bound and a shotgun wound to the head. Soon DSS Hooper is on the trail of a human trafficking ring and discovers a ruthless group with international connections that has at its rotten heart a disregard for all human life.

Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns — it’s all in a day’s work for Lieutenant Dave Klein, Los Angeles Police Department. Trained as a lawyer in school, schooled as a strongarm on the street, bought and paid for by the mob, there’s nothing he’s not into and nobody’s better at any of it. But In the fall of 1958, when the Feds announce a full-out investigation into police corruption, everything goes haywire. Suddenly, the game Klein thought he was running has a new set of rules — and they’re not his. He’s been hung out as bait, “a bad cop to draw the heat,” and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins — all of them hell-bent on keeping their own dirty secrets hidden. For Klein, “forty-two and going on dead,” it’s dues time. And it’s Klein who tells his own story — his voice clipped and sharp and as brutal as the events he’s describing — taking us with him on a hellish Journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, greed, and perversion. It’s a world he helped create, but now he’ll do anything to get out of it alive... Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor-edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering, and the most explosive novel yet from James Ellroy.

From Wilshire to Watts, ambitious rookie Freddy Underhill patrols L.A. looking for glamor and glory. His dreams of being a hotshot California cop are bigger than the bats he makes on his golf game or the busts of the women he picks up. So when a flashy lass he knows from a one-night stand is strangled, Underhill sees his chance to grab headlines with a quick collar. Until the clandestine set-up to catch the killer breaks open a locked door to kinky sex and sleazy secrets — and murder in smog city closes in on both Underhill’s career and his life.

Have yourself a crooked little Christmas with The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries. Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler collects sixty of his all-time favorite holiday crime stories — many of which are difficult or nearly impossible to find anywhere else. From classic Victorian tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy, to contemporary stories by Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain, this collection touches on all aspects of the holiday season, and all types of mysteries. They are suspenseful, funny, frightening, and poignant. Included are puzzles by Mary Higgins Clark, Isaac Asimov, and Ngaio Marsh; uncanny tales in the tradition of A Christmas Carol by Peter Lovesey and Max Allan Collins; O. Henry-like stories by Stanley Ellin and Joseph Shearing, stories by pulp icons John D. MacDonald and Damon Runyon; comic gems from Donald E. Westlake and John Mortimer; and many, many more. Almost any kind of mystery you’re in the mood for — suspense, pure detection, humor, cozy, private eye, or police procedural — can be found in these pages. FEATURING: — Unscrupulous Santas — Crimes of Christmases Past and Present — Festive felonies — Deadly puddings — Misdemeanors under the mistletoe — Christmas cases for classic characters including Sherlock Holmes, Brother Cadfael, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Rumpole of the Bailey, Inspector Morse, Inspector Ghote, A.J. Raffles, and Nero Wolfe.

«Діви ночі» — один з найвідоміших бестселерів української літератури. За визначенням критиків — це перша українська кримінальна повість, написана за всіма законами жанру. Світ повій і кримінальних злочинців, партійних босів і збоченців — все це знайдете саме у «Дівах ночі». І нарешті в повному, а не спотвореному редакторами, обсязі.

«Діви ночі» — один з найвідоміших бестселерів української літератури. За визначенням критиків — це перша українська кримінальна повість, написана за всіма законами жанру. Світ повій і кримінальних злочинців, партійних босів і збоченців — все це знайдете саме у «Дівах ночі». І нарешті в повному, а не спотвореному редакторами, обсязі.