This seventh installment of the premier mystery anthology boasts pulse-quickening stories from all reaches of the genre, selected by the world-renowned mystery writer Michael Connelly. His choices include a Prohibition-era tale of a scorned lover’s revenge, a Sherlock Holmes inspired mystery solved by an actor playing the famous detective onstage, stories of a woman’s near-fatal search for self-discovery, a bar owner’s gutsy attempt to outwit the mob, and a showdown between double-crossing detectives, and a tale of murder by psychology. This year’s edition features mystery favorites as well as talented up-and-comers, for a diverse collection sure to thrill all readers.

What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be a son? What does it mean to be a man? In Men From Boys seventeen masters of crime fiction answer these questions in a multitude of ways. Here are worlds that are instantly recognisable and believable, yet set widely apart. From a deprived London housing estate to the trenches of the First World War, from the claustrophobic confines of a late-night back room poker game to a rundown jazz joint in Manhattan, the writers address just what it means to be a man. The characters who inhabit these stories strive to determine what is right, what will give them dignity, what will earn them self-respect. Some succeed, some fail:...

Whether they’re cops or conmen, savage killers or creative types, gangsters or God-fearing citizens, George Pelecanos’ characters are always engaged in a fight for their lives. They fight to advance or simply to survive; they fight against odds, against enemies, even against themselves. In this, his first collection of stories, the acclaimed novelist introduces readers to a vivid and eclectic cast of combatants. A seasoned claims investigator tracks a supposedly dead man from Miami to Brazil, only to be thrown off his game by a kid from the local slum. An aging loser takes a last stab at respectability by becoming a police informant. A Greek-American couple adopts an interracial trio of...

The job seems simple enough: retrieve the valuable painting — “The Double” — Grace Kinkaid’s ex-boyfriend stole from her. It’s the sort of thing Spero Lucas specializes in: finding what’s missing, and doing it quietly. But Grace wants more. She wants Lucas to find the man who humiliated her — a violent career criminal with a small gang of brutal thugs at his beck and call. Lucas is a man who knows how to get what he wants, whether it’s a thief on the run — or a married woman. In the midst of a steamy, passionate love affair that he knows can’t last, in pursuit of a dangerous man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants, Lucas is forced to decide what kind of man he is — and how far...

Before you can thrive you have to survive. When cocaine hit Washington, D.C., in the mid-1980s, the city became nearly unlivable. Gun-carrying kids turned entire neighborhoods into war zones. Zombies walked the sidewalks on week-long binges. Many police officers and public officials, flush with drug money, looked away. Set amidst this chaos and danger, The Sweet Forever captures an unforgettable fight for survival as two men confront the most soul-chilling violence ever to visit the city. Marcus Clay is proud of his small chain of record stores, and proudest of his new store, right in the old neighborhood — now the epicenter of the drug trade. But a black man can’t get a break, even on his...

King Suckerman is a sterling thriller that weaves the blaxploitation films, the drug deals, the soul music and the racial tensions that defined the seventies into a story of natural-born killers and two men who risk everything to bring them down. Wilton Cooper is at a drive-in movie when he notices the ugly white boy walk into the projection booth. Seconds later he hears a gun goes off, perfectly timed to coincide with the movie’s noisy climax. When the boy struts coolly out, blood sprayed on the front of his cheap print shirt, Cooper knows he’s found his partner. Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay are old friends whose affection transcends the barriers of race. Clay is a Vietnam vet trying to...

Michael Hudson spends the long days in prison devouring books given to him by the prison’s librarian, a young woman named Anna who develops a soft spot for her best student. Anna keeps passing Michael books until one day he disappears, suddenly released after a private detective manipulated a witness in Michael’s trial. Outside, Michael encounters a Washington, D.C. that has changed a lot during his time locked up. Once shady storefronts are now trendy beer gardens and flower shops. But what hasn’t changed is the hard choice between the temptation of crime and doing what’s right. Trying to balance his new job, his love of reading, and the debt he owes to the man who got him released,...

A cut-and-dried case for a wily crime-scene reconstructionist is turned on its head in Michael Connelly’s “Mulholland Dive.” A terrible secret shared between two childhood friends resurfaces decades later as one of them lies on her deathbed in Alice Munro’s masterful “Child’s Play.” James Lee Burke tells the haunting tale of a Hurricane Katrina evacuee who unexpectedly finds comfort from an unimaginable loss in “Mist.” And in Holly Goddard Jones’s “Proof of God,” a young man’s car is repeatedly vandalized as proof that someone knows about the truths he’d never willingly reveal. As Pelecanos notes in his introduction, the twenty “original and unique voices” in this collection pay homage...

For many years, some of the most vital, creative, and exciting fiction published in America has been in the field of mystery, crime, and suspense. Now Robert B. Parker and Otto Penzler — both Edgar winners — have assembled the best that 1997 had to offer: twenty terrific, titillating tales from such masters of the genre as Elmore Leonard, Elizabeth George, James Crumley, Jonathan Kellerman, and Andrew Klavan, from newcomers like Brad Watson, and from well-known literary writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Michael Malone.

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of city-based noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with BROOKLYN NOIR. Each book is comprised of stories set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. The original D.C. NOIR, a groundbreaking collection of new fiction by sixteen different writers, displayed the curatorial prowess of best-selling author George Pelecanos. In D.C. NOIR 2: The Classics, Pelecanos once again assembles an enchanting array of dark and subversive stories, this time selecting the very best of Washington’s historical literary legacy.