Humorous Noir

On the 12th floor of the Acme Building, on a cold February day in St. Paul, Guy Noir looks down the barrel of a loaded revolver in the hands of geezer gangster Joey Roast Beef, who is demanding to hear what lucrative scheme Guy is cooking up with stripper-turned-women's-studies-professor Naomi Fallopian. Everyone wants to know, and Guy faces them one by one, as he and Naomi pursue a dream of earning gazillions by selling a surefire method of dramatic weight loss.

It's not every afternoon that an enigmatic, comely blonde named Stilton (like the cheese) walks into the scruffy gin joint where Sammy "Two Toes" Tiffin tends bar. It's love at first sight, but before Sammy can make his move, an air force general named Remy arrives with some urgent business. 'Cause when you need something done, Sammy is the guy to go to; he's got the connections on the street.

Charlie McGinley writes about tough guys…then he has to become one. Fed up with writing cheesy detective fiction, Charlie dreams of writing something serious. Unfortunately, his publisher insists that he keep cranking out hard-boiled Johnny Dent PI novels. When Charlie stumbles across an urban legend about Thomas Edison inventing a machine that could speak to the dead, he thinks he’s found the perfect gimmick to spice up his next book. That is, until he builds the "Ghost Machine" and accidentally uses it... And people in his small New Mexico town start dying. Suddenly, Charlie must ...

Sammy Dee is a mid-level Long Island mafioso in witness protection. Didier Onyekachukwu was the corrupt minister of finance of the former Upper Volta. Both men find themselves in middle age, living in the Southern California version of genteel poverty in a down-market condo complex called Paradise Gardens. Enter Marcy Gray, a "mature" actress barely getting by on a meager SAG pension.

Al Getty is a dedicated private investigator on the hunt for cheating partners. Ethan Notes is an obsessive stalker fixated on a beautiful woman. After the initial consultation, Al realizes he needs to clarify online what he can lawfully do, to keep weirdos like Notes away. Doing the right thing and reporting the stalker to the police might lead to unexpected drama, but if anyone can handle setbacks, it's Al—he's had a lot of them. When a surprise date with the victim doesn't quite go as planned, it turns out that the stalker might just play a crucial role in the unfolding chaos. This ...

A mix of paranormal mystery, dark humor, and supernatural crime-solving, The Dead Detective box set follows Richelle Dadd, a cop who wakes up to find herself in the middle of a murder scene—her own. Book 1: The Dead Detective Detective Richelle Dadd has seen plenty of crime scenes, but she never expected to wake up in one. Now, as an undead investigator, she’s dealing with more than just a bitter divorce—she’s also on a mission to solve her own murder. But being reanimated comes with a catch: she’s been turned into a zombie assassin, forced to carry out dangerous assignments while...

Set in 1991, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation has rocketed the cast to global fame, the young and impressionable actor Brent Spiner receives a mysterious package and a series of disturbing letters, that take him on a terrifying and bizarre journey that enlists Paramount Security, the LAPD, and even the FBI in putting a stop to the danger that has his life and career hanging in the balance.

Private eye Eddie Valiant doesn't like Toons - those cartoon characters who live side-by-side with humans. But Eddie will work for a Toon if his cash supply is low enough. So he reluctantly agrees when Roger Rabbit, a Toon who plays straight man (or should that be straight rabbit) in the Baby Herman cartoon series, asks him to find out who's been trying - unsuccessfully - to buy his contract from the DeGreasy Brothers syndicate. Then Rocco DeGreasy is murdered - and Roger is the prime suspect!

There’s a voodoo woman in New Orleans who knows your darkest secrets French Quarter paranormal investigator Wyatt Thomas learns he’s permanently linked to the spirit of a man with whom he’d fought a duel during another lifetime. The only person who can free Wyatt from his curse is long-dead voodoo queen Marie Laveaux. To seek her help, he must travel back to Antebellum New Orleans, succeed in his endeavor, or be trapped in the past forever. When Wyatt meets his former lover at the Mulatto Ball, he doesn’t know if he wants to return. While Wyatt is time traveling, detective Tony ...

James Stark, a.k.a. Sandman Slim, crawled out of Hell, took bloody revenge for his girlfriend’s murder, and saved the world along the way. After that, what do you do for an encore? You take a lousy job tracking down monsters for money. It’s a depressing gig, but it pays for your beer and cigarettes. But in L.A., things can always get worse. Like when Lucifer comes to town to supervise his movie biography and drafts Stark as his bodyguard.

His name is Deutsch Baggerly. He's a sort of hot, middle-aged, retired potato salesman turned private eye. He's traded the spuds to go after the puds. Anything anyone can do he can't do better. He has the instincts of a wet-bottom shoofly pie. Absurdity, apathy, and luck are his favorite weapons, and occasionally potatoes. Yet he somehow stumbles into solving cases no one else will touch. He's horrible at shark diving, paintball, karate, safe-cracking, knife-throwing, e-mailing, zip lining, you name it. But don't tangle with him: he's Pennsylvania Dutch and he may put the hex on you. He has...

Publié en 1830, Le Rouge et le Noir de Stendhal est un roman historique et psychologique qui dépeint l’ascension sociale et les ambitions de Julien Sorel, un jeune homme ambitieux issu d'une famille modeste. À travers ses tentatives pour gravir les échelons de la société, il se trouve souvent dans les intrigues au milieu de personnes influentes. Satire mordante de la société française du XIXe siècle, l'œuvre s'attaque aux hypocrisies de l'Église et des aristocraties, tout en constatant la folie des actions du protagoniste.

San Francisco, 1947. Bartender Sammy “Two Toes” Tiffin and the rest of the Cookie’s Coffee Irregulars—a ragtag bunch of working mugs last seen in Noir—are on the hustle: they’re trying to open a driving school; shanghai an abusive Swedish stevedore; get Mable, the local madam, and her girls to a Christmas party at the State Hospital without alerting the overzealous head of the S.F.P.D. vice squad.

There's a different schemer or slimeball behind every door: cocaine duckpins who have survived only by the dumbest fortune, hard-luck gigolos desperate to score, undercover cops busting undercover cops who are running sting operations on undercover cops.

A crime scene cleaner and a demon profiler must clean up a vampire hoarding site, find a powerful relic, and toss it back into hell before it destroys the French Quarter and the world.... My name is Faith Jordan. I clean up crime scenes after the police, CSI, and the dead have gone home, and faithless, dark places where the dead, and other creatures, linger on. I run FULL MOON CLEANERS and my main responsibility is to thoroughly and discreetly mop up after someone or something dies violently, to restore a scene to what it looked like before the violent death. I am daily exposed to nasty ...

When Pussy Lattimore is released from prison, he is determined to quit the lifestyle that led to a five-year incarceration. He has even covered the PUSSY tattoo on his forehead and tells everyone to call him by his birthname, Shelly. But after a night of smoking the glass dick at a party, the old Pussy returns and his actions spark off a chain of violence, awakening a cold-blooded beast that is hellbent on revenge. Charles Bronte, mild-mannered fisherman and part-time pimp, adheres Sugar Bush’s ashes to his bullets after burning his number one girl in a burn barrel and swears to put a ...

Charlie just wants a quiet life … Then he finds a human skull buried in the front yard. Mystery writer Charlie McGinley moves from L.A. to a small town in New Mexico. No more big-city hassles. No more big-city hustles. Guess again! Suddenly Charlie has to deal with disappearing bodies, crabby cops, crazed killers, and a very pregnant wife, while trying desperately to avoid ending up in an unmarked grave next to the mysterious stiff. Gold Medal Winner, Humor and Satire —2024 Global Book Awards “Proverbial skeletons in closets and actual ones buried in the yard help make this a bone-...

Some people say that it’s a demon-haunted world. That certainly is true in Gus’s county around Halloween, mostly due to the digital demons plaguing Gus this year that live inside the new Pakiman game. There’s also a fancy Halloween party to deal with, to which everyone who is someone is invited—and that includes Gus. If getting a costume for a party he doesn’t want to go to was his worst problem, it would be a fun holiday season. Unfortunately, someone keels over dead in the free-cheese section of Fit Foods, and that opens the door to murder. That open door leads Gus right into ...

VHS Killed the LITRPG Star As a fan of everything 1980, 26-year-old Doug Simpson never had the chance to experience the decade. Working at a small-town video rental store, he dreams of being able to enter the horror king Rd Halen's movies and become the hero he has always dreamed about. Then he learns that his two friends working in the basement might just able to make that possible. FBI Special Agent Jenny Winters is looking for a career advancement, and taking down the suspected terrorist working at Vorhees Video may be able to do just that. Working undercover, Jenny is told of Doug's ...

Desperate to complete the last chapter of his law thesis on workplace dynamics for women to secure his tenure, Professor Stanley Hopkins stumbles on an old close college friend, Donald Johansson, who has plenty of female employees. The problem is that Donald is a porn video king. Taking his wife to California’s seedy city of Burbank to help with taping interviews, Stanley realizes he is in way over his head the moment a leading porn star is brutally killed in Donald’s office during a party.