"Within these pages you'll find stories of those walking the straight and narrow--until something untoward happens. Maybe it's someone taking a step out of line, getting caught up in circumstances spiraling out of their control. Maybe they're planning the grift, the grab . . . whatever it is to finally put them over. Other times the steps they take are to get themselves or people they care about out from under. You'll find the offerings in these pages...

Growing up, Kate Priddy was always a bit neurotic, experiencing momentary bouts of anxiety that exploded into full blown panic attacks after an ex-boyfriend kidnapped her and nearly ended her life. When Corbin Dell, a distant cousin in Boston, suggests the two temporarily swap apartments, Kate, an art student in London, agrees, hoping that time away in a new place will help her overcome the recent wreckage of her life. But soon after her arrival at...

In this dark and ethereal debut novel, a young woman tries to make sense of strange artifacts and unsettling memories in an effort to find her mother—missing since being accused of murder

Possessing investigative instincts and a long-standing love for noir novels, Juniper Song is asked to discover the truth about her friend's father's alleged affair with a young paralegal, only to become embroiled in a crime involving deeply hidden secrets from her own life.

It's 1991. Gay American Conner has found refuge in Tokyo after a rough coming out. But a spectacular economic meltdown has crushed Japan's high-flying dreams, and now Tokyo is going sour for Conner, too. He's turned to crime to bail out an ex-boyfriend, he's alienating friends and he's started sleeping with a woman. When a crime scheme goes south, he scours Tokyo's dimly lit night scene for a solution. Conner and fellow refuge-seeker Mariko,...

A seemingly straightforward kidnapping-for-ransom scheme by 1930s gangster "Machine Gun" Kelly is thrown into near-whimsical chaos by the greed of two partners, a determined former Texas Ranger, and Kelly's two-faced wife.

"A rural noir about a woman on a pulse-pounding expedition to deliver a fugitive-and forced to confront her own past on the journey"--

It is 1917, in that sliver of border land that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest; handsome; intelligent); Cob (short; heavy set; a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest; thin; ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled...

"A hard-boiled elf is framed for murder in a North Pole world that plays reindeer games for keeps and where favorite holiday characters live complex lives beyond December"--from publisher's description.

"In the 1980s, a teenage girl terrorizes the Sicilian town of Gela. Tina's father was in Cosa Nostra and was brutally shot dead in front of her when she was just eight; after that, she made it her mission in life to join the mafia, although women are traditionally not allowed in. Nicknamed 'a masculidda, or "the tomboy," Tina is notorious through Gela for her recklessness, cruelty, and complete disregard for societal expectations. When a news article...