Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Hard-Boiled

For years, Donna ignored the guns in her husband's safe, his long hours, and all the cash he couldn't possibly have made as an "efficiency expert." But finally she was forced to admit that Peter Macklin is a killer for hire. Donna wants a divorce, and she wants to take her husband for all he's worth. But she won't get a penny if he's dead.

The Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith is halfway through his sermon when killers open fire. He is preaching against the evils of gambling, which a cartel of mobsters is trying to legalize in Detroit. The hail of gunfire misses the reverend, but a choir member is cut down—the first victim in the battle for the soul of the Motor City. The Detroit mob has erupted into civil war, and professional killer Peter Macklin is caught in the middle. A former mob employee, he has since tried to stay away from the savagery of organized crime, but now they're offering him a job too tempting to refuse.

Siegfried, a terrorist group made up of a killer, a bassist, an ex-marine, a demolitions expert, a Black Panther, a national guardsman, and a couple of spoiled teenagers, is about to become Detroit's worst nightmare. The motley gang boards a river cruise boat armed with M16s and enough explosives to burn the city down. They have eight hundred hostages, and if they don't get what they want, Siegfried will kill every soul aboard.

Johns Davis has just left the Alamo when he feels the garrote wrap around his neck. The bookie slams his foot on the gas, sending the car into oncoming traffic. It bounces off a van, hops the curb, and crashes into a hotel, knocking Davis unconscious and breaking the neck of his would-be assassin. Davis can breathe again, but just for a moment. When the mob wants you dead, they'll always send another killer.

Fired from his longtime job as captain of the Coal Patrol, two-foot-three-inch, 1,300-year-old elf Gumdrop Coal is angry. He's one of Santa's original elves, inspired by the fat man's vision to bring joy to children on that one special day each year. But somewhere along the way, things went sour for Gumdrop. Maybe it was delivering one too many lumps of coal for the Naughty List. Maybe it's the conspiracy against Christmas that he's starting to sense down every chimney.

Beneath the glamour of a trendy Hamptons summer town lies another world - one of dark lives and desperate secrets. And when Labor Day arrives and the beautiful people depart, locals like Declan MacManus are left behind to make a living out of just surviving. A sometime P.I., MacManus is an expert at self-defense and a master of self-destruction, but nothing he's seen of the dark side of fortune can prepare him for what he is about to discover.

Caleb Rush, aka Crush, is the toughest, coolest bodyguard/bouncer in Los Angeles, a man who lives strictly by his own moral code, which doesn't exactly hew to the standards of US law. When Amelia Trask, the wild daughter of a scruples-free billionaire tycoon, comes to Crush for help, his quiet life roars into overdrive, and he has to use his wits, brawn, martial-arts training, and knowledge of the Russian Mafia to stay alive and clean up the mess that young Amelia has created.

Atlantica - the forgotten isle, the glittering gem in the cesspool of humanity's future. Anything you do inside your own home is allowed. It is a dog-eat-dog world of millionaires and billionaires. The rest of society beneath them live in ignorance. Those at the top have money, tools, people, assassins, and murderers. One such assassin was a rumor, a myth, a ghost in the night. The Red Countess, the lady Valentina Winters. A player among the elite has something Valentina wants, and she is willing to do most anything to get it.

Sgt. Bren Allred has seen all manner of criminality in beautiful Graham County, Arizona. He has managed to keep the worst of it from his wife, Monica, who is having a troubled pregnancy. But it will be difficult to keep the devils at bay as a new kind of trouble erupts across the region . When deputies Sanchez and Haley go undercover to investigate a rash of copper theft, they unwittingly stumble across a shadowy spy network. Meanwhile, Apache Police Sgt. Al Victor is confronted by a murder case involving a diplomat as he grapples with the ever-present problem of alcohol on the reservation.

When Deputy Sara Cross arrives at the late-night scene of a shooting by the side of a deserted highway, she learns that her former partner---also her former lover---fatally shot a 24-year-old man, claiming that the man pulled a gun during what should have been a routine traffic stop. But the details soon point to another scenario, and in order to protect herself and her son, she must follow the truth no matter where it leads.

A split-second decision with no second chance: get it wrong and you wake up dead. On a blowtorch-hot night in Cape Town, American ex-model Roxy Palmer and her gunrunner husband, Joe, are carjacked, leaving Joe lying in a pool of blood. As the carjackers make their getaway, Roxy makes a fateful choice that changes her life forever. Disco and Godwynn, the ghetto gangbangers who sped away in Joe's convertible, will stop at nothing to track her down.

Black and Miri just want some alone time. Instead, they get thrown into a high-profile murder case when one of Miri's patients shows up dead. When the body is found, beheaded and tied to a pier, Los Angeles detectives descend on San Francisco, convinced it's the serial killer they've been hunting, known only by his media name of "the Templar". When the Templar continues to cut a swath through San Francisco, his victims begin to show a new pattern, however - a pattern that appears to have Miri at its center.

Being reinstated to the AJS and being safe again are two very different outcomes. They are looking for Terra. Everywhere she turns, an enemy force is after her, looking to extract the AI in her head to destroy the one weak link in their chain. The APRIL software has been deployed AJS-wide, and now whoever is at the top of the chain has their eyes on the entire city. Those above are controlling where the AJS go, monitoring and manipulating law and order.

The daughter of Armenian immigrants, Rubina and her husband, Van, recently learned that she cannot get pregnant - so they hired Rubina's younger cousin, Lusig, to act as a surrogate. However, Lusig's best friend, Nora, has been missing for a month, and Rubina is concerned that her cousin is dealing with her stress in a way that could harm the baby. Rubina hires Song to shadow her and report all that she finds. Of course, Lusig is frantically searching for her friend, and Song's case soon turns into a hunt for the missing woman.

Declan "Mac" MacManus, some-time PI turned full-time Southampton cabbie, has had to endure much in his young life: the loss of family and friends, grave bodily injuries at the hands of ruthless enemies, and the knowledge that more than a few lives have been shattered by the decisions fate has forced him to make. But nothing of what Mac has encountered - and nothing of what he now knows about his own mysterious past - can compare to what awaits him in the heart-pounding final installment of The Gin Palace Trilogy.

A tale of two crimes in the twenty-first century: In the rugged ranch country of eastern Arizona, Graham County Deputy Branden Allred and San Carlos Tribal Police Officer Allen Victor are investigating the death of a young Apache. At first it appears to be a freak accident, a conclusion the Sheriff likes, but the officers begin to suspect murder. Motive is the major missing element, and nothing makes sense until a one-hundred-year old unsolved crime comes to light.

The pressure is rising, the walls closing in. Terra must deal with a voice in her head. Can Terra find evidence against the police captain, Parker Garcia, or will she trip over rules and regulations in the process? For every fox, there is a bloodhound. For Garcia, she is named Terra Kris.

To a corrupt chief of police intent on maintaining his power at all costs, part-time PI Declan "Mac" MacManus is a problem that must finally be addressed. Cursed with an unwavering sense of right and wrong, and a fierce loyalty to his few friends, Mac has become known as someone the working class of Southampton can turn to in times of desperate need. On a rain-swept night in October, Mac witnesses a brutal homicide, but he has learned that nothing on the East End is ever what it seems.

In the year 2020, bounty hunter Daniel Legend finds himself tracking a quarry of a different kind: his long-lost sister. Armed only with his wits, his gun, and a mysterious postcard, Daniel makes his way to the heart of the seedy Shinjuku district of Tokyo, where a clash between two underworlds - the criminal and the infernal - threatens the very fabric of reality.

Valentina has a problem. An assassin competitor shows up unannounced and unappreciated. Never a good situation to find oneself in. The Conclave members are infighting and providing her additional jobs. Now, if those jobs weren't in conflict, life might have been a touch easier to handle. With an assassin on her tail, two powerfully rich competitors vying for her services, and worries about her missing sibling, she is determined to make it all work out in the end. Or several people are going to die.