Arcadia Public Library

"Los Angeles Stories is a collection of loosely linked, noir-ish tales that evoke a bygone era in one of America's most iconic cities. In post-World War II Los Angeles, as power was concentrating and fortunes were being made, a do-it-yourself culture of cool cats, outsiders, and oddballs populated the old downtown neighborhoods of Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine. Ordinary working folks rubbed elbows with petty criminals, grifters, and all sorts of women...

"Gold Medal books weren't books that won literary awards, or any kind of awards at all. But during the 1950s Gold Medal put out some of the best writers America had to offer, writers like Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, and David Goodis, who not only peered into the bleakest reaches of the psyche, but did it with blood-tinged glee. And while many of the Gold Medal pulps have since become acknowledged classics, one of its finest, Elliott Chaze's Black...

To escape the awful life she has descended into, Luz plans carefully. She takes only the clothes on her back, a Colt .45, and all the money in her husband's safe. The corpses in the hallway weren't part of her plan. Luz needs to find the daughter she left behind years earlier, but she knows she may die trying. Her husband is El Principe, a key player in a high-powered drug cartel, a business he runs with the same violence he has used to keep Luz his...

In 1959 Montana, when a fatal car accident shatters his world, 10-year-old Lucas finds himself confronting crime and vengeance, humor and heroism, all against the backdrop of growing up during the Space Race, the brutal racism of segregation and the hope of a new generation to move us forward.

"Dr. Eldon Chance is a man primed for spectacular ruin. His wife has left him for a dyslexic fitness instructor, his teenaged daughter is disappearing into drugs; he owes the IRS untold sums; his neuro-psychiatry practice has been reduced to analyzing people with brain injuries on behalf of insurance companies. He drinks too much. His work is repetitive, disturbing, and devoid of emotional satisfaction. And things are about to get worse. Into Dr....

This anthology collects nearly a century of Chicago crime fiction. Chicago, city of darkness. With more murders per capita than any other city its size, it is also a city of extensive crime writing, from the pulps to modern day. This anthology collects nearly a century of Chicago crime fiction.

"December 1941. America teeters on the brink of war, and in Honolulu, Hawaii, police detective Joe McGrady is assigned to investigate a homicide that will change his life forever. Because the trail of murder he uncovers will lead him across the Pacific, far from home and the woman he loves; and though the U.S. doesn't know it yet, a Japanese fleet is already steaming toward Pearl Harbor." --