A Killing Rain

Dark, Southern gothic tale of homicide detective Raven Burns, with a complicated past and a desperate case to solve. Black Girls Lit recommends the first book, A Killing Fire "to crime fiction and mystery lovers and fans of Ruth Ware and Gillian Flynn.” “Full-bodied and dynamic characters carry this one along a mystery, tying a brutal past with a bloody present that will keep you guessing right up to the finale.” — Unnerving Magazine on Book 1 in the series. After former homicide Raven Burns returns to Byrd’s Landing, Louisiana to begin a new life, she soon finds herself trapped by the old one when her nephew is kidnapped by a ruthless serial killer, and her foster brother becomes the main suspect. To make matters worse, she is being pursued by two men— one who wants to redeem her soul for the murder Raven felt she had no choice but to commit, and another who wants to lock her away forever. FLAME TREE PRESS is the imprint of long-standing independent Flame Tree Publishing, dedicated to full-length original fiction in the horror and suspense, science fiction & fantasy, and crime / mystery / thriller categories. The list brings together fantastic new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices. Learn more about Flame Tree Press at www.flametreepress.com and connect on social media @FlameTreePress

A deep freeze is bearing down on the Florida Everglades. For Detective Louis Kincaid, the coldest night of the year brings a grisly discovery that will lead him into a nightmarish battle of wits with a ruthless predator.

“Full-bodied and dynamic characters carry this one along a mystery, tying a brutal past with a bloody present that will keep you guessing right up to the finale.” — Unnerving Magazine As a child forced to witness her father’s crimes, homicide Detective Raven Burns dedicates every waking moment to proving that she is not her father’s child. But when she shoots a suspect who has what turns out to be an unloaded weapon, Raven finds that she must confront both the demons of her past and the stains on her soul in order to stop a killer. FLAME TREE PRESS is the imprint of long-standing independent Flame Tree Publishing, dedicated to full-length original fiction in the horror and suspense, science fiction & fantasy, and crime / mystery / thriller categories. The list brings together fantastic new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices. Learn more about Flame Tree Press at www.flametreepress.com and connect on social media @FlameTreePress

The Puget Sound region is beautiful, lush with green trees, sun-sparkled waters, wide-open spaces and white-capped mountains. It’s also rich with darkness, gunmetal gray skies, rain-slicked streets, and deep shadows that give cover to its darkest secrets. Small wonder that this corner of America is a high-demand lifestyle destination — and, not so long ago, the serial killer and Sasquatch-conspiracy capital of the country. The Killing Rain captures that delicious dichotomy in all its deliciously dark glory, through short stories ranging from the cozy to the hardboiled, all charged with depicting Seattle as a real or imagined place. These crime tales have been collected in conjunction with “Seattle Shakedown” — the name we’ve given to the return of Left Coast Crime to the Pacific Northwest. It takes place from April 10-14 in Bellevue, Washington, just a hop and skip from Seattle across Lake Washington. And, with an enticing foreword from LCC Guest of Honor Megan Abbott, The Killing Rain will be the perfect shivery companion for what’s (almost) sure to be the Seattle area’s shivery early-spring weather. Edited by Jim Thomsen, who grew up on an island near Seattle and went to boarding school in the shadows of the nearby Green River, at a time America’s most prolific serial killer was just getting started. Coincidence? Good crime fiction doesn’t allow for it!

Hired by the Mossad to perform a series of strategic assassinations in Asia, John Rain, accompanied by ex-Marine Dox, inadvertently botches the assignment and finds himself seeking assistance from alluring Israeli agent Delilah. Reprint.

A Japanese-American assassin who specializes in "natural cause" killings finds his carefully ordered world coming under siege in the wake of a government official's murder, with which he has been falsely connected, a situation that is complicated by his attraction to the victim's daugher. Reprint.

Accepting an assignment from the CIA to take out an arms dealer who is supplying criminal groups in Southeast Asia, assassin-for-hire John Rain finds the job compromised by a rival assassin and the fear that he is being set up. Reprint.

On 16 June 1957, a shoot-out in a village church in northern Lebanon leaves two dozen people dead. In the aftermath of the massacre, the town is rent in two: the Al-Ramis in the north and their rivals the Al-Samaeenis in the south. But lives once so closely intertwined cannot easily be divided. Neighbours turn into enemies and husbands and wives are forced to choose between loyalty to each other and loyalty to their clan. Drawing on an actual killing that took place in his home town, Douaihy reconstructs that June day from the viewpoints of people who witnessed the killing or whose lives were forever altered by it. A young girl overhears her father lending his gun to his cousins, but refusing to accompany them to the church. A school boy walks past the dead bodies, laid out in the town square on beds brought out from the houses. A baker whose shop is trapped on the wrong side of the line hopes the women who buy his bread will protect him. At the center of the portrait is Eliyya, who, twenty years after emigrating to the US, returns to the village to learn about the father who was shot through the heart in the massacre, the father he never knew. With a masterful eye for detail, Douaihy reconstructs that fateful June Sunday when rain poured from the sky and the traditions and affections of village life were consumed by violence and revenge.