From award-winning author Tom Piccirilli comes a wholly original crime novel introducing the Rands, a vipers' nest of crooks and cons, one generation stealing from the next. Upon the razor-thin edge between love and violence lives a pair of brothers, their bonds frayed by betrayals and guilt, their loyalty to each other their last salvation. Raised to pick a pocket before he could walk, Terry Rand cut free from his family after his older brother, Collie, went on a senseless killing spree that left eight dead.

After his brutally violent cop father kills his mother in a heinous fashion on Christmas day, a young boy is raised on the streets of Brooklyn to become the deadliest hitman for the Mob. But even while he carves out a life and reputation for himself dispatching enemies of the syndicate, the hitter is planning his revenge against those who helped to make him what he is. From the cruel mob family to his own murderous old man, who sends threats and taunts from the safety of his jail cell.

Crease is going back to his quaint, quiet hometown of Hangtree. It's where his father, the sheriff, met ruin in the face of a scandal involving the death of a kidnapped little girl and her missing ransom. It's where Crease was beaten, jailed, and kicked clear of the town line 10 years earlier.

Cryer once had another name, but he can't remember it. The man he used to be was stabbed in the head by an assailant. After months of catatonia, Cryer awakens in a mental facility to find that his former life is almost completely forgotten. He knows his wife and daughter have been murdered - he saw them die moments before his own assault - but his shattered mind is incapable of retaining their names. Or even his own.

Chase is a performance poet with a history of mental illness who's spent time in jail and hospitals while trying to deal with traumas from his past. A cult figure in New York City, he's as well known for his mania as he is for his poetry. During a reading, Chase sees a woman he believed had died on the ward due to the cruelty of a brutal guard - is she a hallucination, a ghost, or a killer who faked her own murder?

On the day of his release from a mental institution, Pace is taken "hostage" by Faust, Pia, and Hayden, three escapees from the hospital who disappeared after the presumed rape and beating of Cassandra Kaltzas, daughter of the Greek munitions tycoon Alexandra Kaltzas. Each suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder, experiencing complex delusions and sometimes fantastical identities. Pace tries to piece together what happened when apparently one of their alternate personalities tried to kill Cassandra.

Matthew Cahill is a simple man leading a quiet life... until he is tragically killed in an avalanche at a ski resort. Three months later his corpse is found and sent to the morgue - but then something inexplicable happens. He wakes up. Now he can see evil... as a festering rot that eats people alive from the inside out. And he can see Mr. Dark, the horrific figure who gleefully spreads it like a plague... and whois the only one who can tell Matt whether he is still a man... or the walking dead.For Matt, each day is a journey into a supernatural world he knows nothing about....

For a fee so big he can't turn it down, Simeon Grist is hired to watchdog the kind of guy he'd usually prefer to throw through the nearest window. Toby Vane is the golden boy of prime-time television, whose gee-whiz smile and chiseled features mask a dark secret that would take the shine off for his millions of adoring female fans: every now and then he beats up a woman, and almost any woman will do.

When a doctor at a suburban women's health clinic is being harassed, she hires Phin to make it stop. But the situation proves to be larger, and more dangerous, than even he can handle on his own. So he calls in some friends to help out; a P.I. named Harry McGlade and a female cop named Jack Daniels.

Colleen McElroy grew up wealthy and pampered, the daughter of a prominent society family in Lexington, Kentucky. But her privileged upbringing could not prepare or protect her from her cruel and abusive first husband. Although her calamitous marriage left her with physical and emotional scars that have yet to heal, they haven't prevented her from doing her best to rebuild her life.

Denise Hamilton writes the Eve Diamond series. Her books have been shortlisted for the Edgar, Macavity, Anthony, and Willa Cather awards. The Los Angeles Times named Last Lullaby a Best Book of 2004, and it was also a USA Today Summer Pick and a finalist for a Southern California Booksellers Association 2004 award.

The two most difficult days in Bangkok writer Poke Rafferty's life begin with an emergency visit from Edward Dell, the almost-boyfriend of Poke's teenage daughter, Miaow. The boy's father, Buddy, a late-middle-aged womanizer who has moved to Bangkok for happy hunting, has disappeared, and money is being siphoned out of his bank and credit card accounts. It soon becomes apparent that Buddy is in the hands of a pair of killers who prey on Bangkok's "sexpats"; when his accounts are empty, he'll be found floating facedown in a Bangkok canal.

They call the ancient hills of Jerusalem the butcher's theater. Here, upon this bloodstained stage, a faceless killer performs his violent specialty: The first to die brutally is a fifteen-year-old girl. She is drained of blood, then carefully bathed and shrouded in white. Precisely one week later, a second victim is found.

Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books has published over 60 volumes in its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Featuring Noir Series stories from: Dennis Lehane, Don Winslow, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Susan Straight, Jonathan Safran Foer, Laura Lippman, Pete Hamill, Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Child, T. Jefferson Parker, Lawrence Block, Terrance Hayes, and more.

Lieutenant Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels is having a bad week. Her live-in boyfriend has left her for his personal trainer, chronic insomnia has caused her to max out her credit cards with late-night home shopping purchases, and a frightening killer who calls himself "The Gingerbread Man" is dumping mutilated bodies in her district.