"One cop strives to bring order and justice to a lawless boomtown"--

""Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights." - Raymond Chandler. In a world of criminals, thugs, con artists, cheats, and swindlers, there must be a man to stand against the powers of darkness and corruption. A man not afraid to walk the mean streets-whether they be those of 1930s Los Angeles, an ancient fantasy realm, or some far-flung planet of a future star empire. He is a man who knows that a "good man" is not always a...

Two estranged twin sisters hunt down their elusive mother—and face down the darkness they tried to escape.

"In "The Secret Life of Insects", a forensic entomologist tries to solve the inexplicable murder of his wife, who impossibly seems to have been killed in a forest at the same time she was asleep in bed with him. The husband in "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" becomes concerned by his wife's strange behavior, which includes sleepwalking, muttering strange phrases, and a bizarre erotic fascination with octopi. In "Come to Me", a woman visits a witch...

From the award-winning author, who Stephen King called "a master of the short story" comes this unforgettable 20th-anniversary celebration of Hard Case Crime.

Investigating how a severed hand ends up on the third green of a Cumbrian golf course is not how Detective Inspector Avison Fluke has planned to spend his Saturday. So when a secret protection unit from London swoops in quoting national security, he's secretly pleased. Then a young woman arrives at his lakeside cabin with a cryptic message: a code known to only a handful of people and it forces Fluke back into the investigation he's only just been...

"Susana Macaya, a young gypsy girl raised as a paya, disappears after her bachelorette party. Her body is found two days later: the victim has been brutally tortured following an unusual and atrocious ritual. Her sister Lara suffered the same fate seven years ago, on the eve of her wedding, but the murderer is serving a sentence in prison: has someone imitated his terrible methods or is an innocent person imprisoned? Inspector Elena Blanco, a veteran...