Alabama joins Mississippi as fertile Deep South soil for the Noir Series

The plan is simple. A favor really. All Nick Travers, a former professional football player turned professor, has to do is drive up Highway 61 from New Orleans to Memphis and track down the lost brother of one of his best friends. But as Travers knows, these simple jobs seldom turn out smoothly. His friend’s brother is Clyde James, who, in 1968, was one of the finest soul singers Memphis had to offer. But when James’s wife and close friend were murdered, his life was shattered. He turned to the streets, where, decades ago, he disappeared. Travers’s search for the singer soon leads him to the casinos in Tunica, Mississippi, and converges with the agenda of the Dixie Mafia, a zealot gubernatorial candidate linked to a neo-Confederacy movement, and an obsessed killer who thinks he has a true spiritual link to the late Elvis Presley

From the critically acclaimed, award-nominated author comes a new noir crime classic about one of the most notorious trials in American history. Critics called Ace Atkins's Wicked City 'gripping, superb' (Library Journal), 'stunning' (The Tampa Tribune), 'terrific' (Associated Press), 'riveting' (Kirkus Reviews), 'wicked good' (Fort Worth Star-Telegram), and 'Atkins' best novel' (The Washington Post). But Devil's Garden is something else again. San Francisco, September 1921: Silent-screen comedy star Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle is throwing a wild party in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel: girls, jazz, bootleg hooch… and a dead actress named Virginia Rappe. The D.A. says it was Arbuckle who killed her – crushing her under his weight – and brings him up on manslaughter charges. William Randolph Hearst's newspapers stir up the public and demand a guilty verdict. But what really happened? Why do so many people at the party seem to have stories that conflict? Why is the prosecution hiding witnesses? Why are there body parts missing from the autopsied corpse? Why is Hearst so determined to see Fatty Arbuckle convicted? In desperation, Arbuckle's defense team hires a Pinkerton agent to do an investigation of his own and, they hope, discover the truth. The agent's name is Dashiell Hammett, and he's the book's narrator. What he discovers will change American legal history – and his own life – forever. 'The historical accuracy isn't what elevates Atkins' prose to greatness,' said The Tampa Tribune. 'It's his ability to let these characters breathe in a way that few authors could ever imagine. He doesn't so much write them as unleash them upon the page.' You will not soon forget the extraordinary characters and events in Devil's Garden

What would you do if you only had twenty four hours to save the life of a friend? Searching for lost souls and solving problems was never Nick Travers’s intention when he started doing favors for his buddies. A former football player who sometimes teaches blues history at Tulane, Nick would rather just watch the Louisiana rain and listen to old Muddy Waters records. But when music mogul Teddy Paris, a former team-mate from the New Orleans Saints, visits Nick and asks him to help find $700,000 taken from a rap prodigy, Nick can’t turn down his friend. The missing money will pay a bounty on Paris’s head that was set by a cross-town rival, a street-hard thug named Cash. Nick soon finds himself lost in the world of Gucci-lined Bentleys and endless bottles of Cristal champagne. He sets out with fifteen-year-old rap star, ALIAS, seeking a team of grifters that conned the kid. But uncertainty, the constant threat of violence, and a phantom grave robber haunt their search. When a killer hits too close, Nick takes ALIAS with him to the Mississippi Delta, where he comes under the protection and guidance of Nick’s mentor, blues legend JoJo Jackson, and his wife, Loretta. Soon Nick, JoJo, and another old-school Delta tough guy do battle in the Dirty South rap world where money, sex, and murder threaten to take down Paris’s empire and destroy ALIAS. As cultures clash, the story winds its way through the infamous Calliope housing projects, the newly built mansions of New Orleans’s lake-front, and ultimately to the brackish muck of the Bayou Savage. Dirty South is a thrilling tale of friendship, betrayal, revenge, and trust from a fresh and hip new voice. Take a ride to the other side of New Orleans, away from the neon gloss of Bourbon Street, to see what the dirty south is all about

From "one of the best crime writers at work today" (Michael Connelly) comes a fast,f unny, violent new noir crime classic-a Coen Brothers movie come to life. He has been compared to Lehane, Ellroy, and Pelecanos, but Ace Atkins's rich, raucous, passionate blend of historical novel and crime story is all his own and never more so than in Infamous. In July 1933, the gangster known as George "Machine Gun" Kelly staged the kidnapping-for-ransom of an Oklahoma oilman. He would live to regret it. Kelly was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, and what started clean soon became messy, as two of his partners cut themselves into the action; a determined former Texas Ranger makes tracking Kelly his mission; and Kelly's wife, ever alert to her own self-interest, starts playing both ends against the middle. The result is a mesmerizing tale set in the first days of the modern FBI, featuring one of the best femmes fatales in history-the Lady Macbeth of Depression-era crime-a great unexpected hero, and some of the most colorful supporting characters in recent crime fiction

**P.I. Spenser, knight-errant of the Back Bay, returns in this stellar addition to the iconic *New York Times* –bestselling series from author Ace Atkins.** What started out as a joke landed seventeen-year-old Dillon Yates in a lockdown juvenile facility in Boston Harbor. When he set up a prank Twitter account for his vice principal, he never dreamed he could be brought up on criminal charges, but that’s exactly what happened. This is Blackburn, Massachusetts, where zero tolerance for minors is a way of life. Leading the movement is tough-as-nails Judge Joe Scali, who gives speeches about getting tough on today’s wild youth. But Dillon’s mother, who knows other Blackburn kids who are doing hard time for minor infractions, isn’t buying Scali’s line. She hires Spenser to find the truth behind the draconian sentencing. From the Harbor Islands to a gated Florida community, Spenser and trusted ally Hawk follow a trail through the Boston underworld with links to a shadowy corporation that runs New England’s private prisons. They eventually uncover a culture of corruption and cover-ups in the old mill town, where hundreds of kids are sent off to for-profit juvie jails. ### Review “Atkins does a wonderful job with the characters created by Parker. To loyalists it may be heresy, but a case can be made for the Atkins novels being better than some of the last Spenser mysteries penned by Parker. A top-notch thriller.”— *Booklist* (starred) “It's great to see Spenser tackle a social evil with its roots in real life.”— *Kirkus* “A topical plot line propels bestseller Atkins’s engrossing fourth Spenser novel…Once again, Atkins has done a splendid job of capturing the voice of the late Robert B. Parker.”— *Publishers Weekly* ### About the Author **Ace Atkins** is the Edgar-nominated author of seventeen books, including five books in the Quinn Colson series *.* Selected by the Robert B. Parker estate to continue the Spenser novels, he has also written *Robert. B. Parker’s Lullaby* , *Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland,* and *Robert B. Parker’s Cheap Shot,* all of which were *New York Times* bestsellers. Atkins lives in Oxford, Mississippi

Literary crime fiction master Tom Franklin curates this volume of stellar noir from the Deep South

Brand-new stories by: Ace Atkins, Laura Lippman, Patty Friedmann, Barbara Hambly, Tim McLoughlin, Olympia Vernon, David Fulmer, Jervey Tervalon, James Nolan, Kalamu ya Salaam, Maureen Tan, Thomas Adcock, Jeri Cain Rossi, Christine Wiltz, Greg Herren, Julie Smith, Eric Overmyer, and Ted O’Brien. [A portion of the profits from New Orleans Noir will be donated to Katrina KARES, a hurricane relief program sponsored by the New Orleans Institute that awards grants to writers affected by the hurricane.] New Orleans is a third world country in itself, a Latin, African, European (and often amoral) culture trapped in a Puritan nation. It’s everyone’s seamy underside, the city where respectable citizens go to get drunk, puke in the gutter, dance on tabletops, and go home with strangers, all without guilt. It’s the metropolitan equivalent of eating standing up — if it happened in New Orleans, it doesn’t count. The city was always the home of the lovable rogue, the poison magnolia, the bent politico, the sociopathic street thug, and, especially, the heartless con artist — but in post-Katrina times it struggles against... well, the same old problems, just writ large and with a new breed of carpetbagger thrown in. Combine all that with a brilliant literary tradition and you have New Orleans Noir, a sparkling collection of tales exploring the city’s wasted, gutted neighborhoods, its outwardly gleaming “sliver by the river,” its still-raunchy French Quarter, and other hoods so far from the Quarter they might as well be on another continent. It also looks back into the past, from that recent innocent time known in contemporary New Orleans as “pre-K,” to the mid-nineteenth century, the other time the city was mostly swampland

This sequel to the original best-selling New Orleans Noir takes a literary tour through some of the darkest writing in New Orleans history

Tampa Bay joins Miami in representing the (alleged) Sunshine State in the Noir Series arena

In 1955, Look magazine called Phenix City, Alabama, “The Wickedest City in America,” but even that may have been an understatement. It was a stew of organized crime and corruption, run by a machine that dealt with complaints forcefully and with dispatch. No one dared cross them – no one even tried. And then the machine killed the wrong man. When crime – fighting attorney Albert Patterson is gunned down in a Phenix City alley in the spring of 1954, the entire town seems to pause just for a moment – and when it starts up again, there is something different about it. A small group of men meet and decide that they have had enough, but what that means and where it will take them is something they could not have foreseen. Over the course of the next several months, lives will change, people will die, and unexpected heroes will emerge – like “a Randolph Scott western,” one of them remarks, “played out not with horses and Winchesters but with Chevys and.38s and switchblades.” Peopled by an extraordinary cast of characters, both real and fictional, Wicked City is a novel of uncommon intensity – rich with atmosphere and filled with sensuality and surprise

Армейский рейнджер Квин Колсон приезжает в родной город в штате Миссисипи, где не был вот уже шесть лет. Привел его на родину печальный повод: смерть дяди. Квин собирается отдать родственнику последний долг, разобраться с наследством и возвратиться на службу. Но прошедший горячие точки солдат понимает, что в родном городке слишком многое изменилось: власть вершат преступники. По официальной версии, его дядя, шериф округа, покончил жизнь самоубийством, но некоторые факты позволяют предположить убийство. Квин стремится узнать правду о дяде, своей семье, друзьях детства. И как только истина приоткрывается, понимает, что для него теперь нет пути назад. Он не может позволить плохим парням и дальше устанавливать свои законы