Murder For Love

A campy dark comedy for the angry and the disenchanted. Last November, I found a dead body inside the freezer that my roommate keeps inside the garage. My first thought was to call the police, but Jignesh hadn't paid his share of the rent just yet. It wasn't due until the thirtieth, and you know how difficult it is to find people who pay on time. Jignesh always does. Also, he had season tickets for the LA Opera, and well . . . Madame Butterfly. Tosca. The Flying Dutchman . . . at the Dorothy Chandler . . . you cannot say no to that, can you? Well, it's been a few good months now--Madame Butterfly was just superb, thank you. However, last Friday, I found a second body inside that stupid freezer in the garage. This time I'm evicting Jignesh. My house isn't a mortuary . . . alas, I need to come up with some money first. You'll understand, therefore, that I desperately need to sell this novel. Just enough copies to help me survive until I find a job . . . what could I do that doesn't demand too much effort? We have a real treasure here, anyhow. Some chapters are almost but not quite pornographic. You could safely lend this to nana afterward!

A collection of 16 original stories from today's foremost fiction writers--including Ed McBain, Jonathan Kellerman, Sara Paretsky, Mary Higgins Clark, Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, John Gardner, Anne Perry, Donna Tartt, Shel Silverstein, Bobbie Ann Mason, Carol Higgins Clark, William J. Caunitz, Michael Malone, and Faye Kellerman--each a brilliant mystery exploring that peculiar area that lies between love and death.

When she’s called to the murder scene, the last thing San Francisco Homicide detective Valerie Hart is expecting is for Katherine Glass to walk back into her life. Six years earlier, revulsion and fascination had gripped the nation in equal measure, as beautiful, intelligent, charming—and utterly evil—Katherine Glass had been convicted on six counts of Murder One. But the freshly-mutilated corpse in the ground-floor apartment bears all the hallmarks of Katherine’s victims. And then there’s the note, with its chilling implications. Addressed to Valerie. To stop the slaughter, Valerie has no choice. She must ask Katherine Glass to help her decipher the killer’s twisted message. But that means re-entering the pitch-black labyrinth that is Katherine’s mind, and this time Valerie isn’t so sure which one of them will survive.

Marc and Debra seemed to have it all—a lovely home in the Prairie town of Medicine Hat, fulfilling careers, a supportive marriage, and two beautiful children: eight-year-old Jacob and twelve-year-old JR. After years of struggle to reach this point, they finally felt their future held promise. But on April 23, 2006, their bodies were discovered in their basement, covered in savage stab wounds. Upstairs, Jacob lay dead on his bed, his toys spattered with blood. Investigators worried for JR’s safety, but unknown to them, the pretty honour roll student had been developing a disturbing alter ego online. Runaway Devil professed a fondness for a darker world of death metal music, the goth subculture, and a love for Jeremy Steinke, a twenty-three-year-old high-school dropout who lived in a rundown trailer park. Soon, shocking evidence in JR’s school locker—printed here for the first time—led police to believe the girl was a suspect in her family’s murders. The case horrified parents everywhere. Journalists Robert Remington and Sherri Zickefoose have been covering it from the beginning, and in Runaway Devil, they reveal what really happened: the unlikely young love, the teenage rebellion, a troubling world of adolescent drifters, and a small community torn apart by an unthinkable crime. A modern cautionary tale, Runaway Devil is also a chilling portrait of an approval-seeking man smitten with a manipulative young girl—who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted.

On Friday, April 8th, 1994 the body of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was discovered in a room above his garage in Seattle. The police declared it an open-and-shut case of suicide, but this book, drawing on forensic evidence and police reports, explodes the myth that Cobain took his own life and reveals the official scenario was scientifically impossible. Love & Death paints a critical portrait of Courtney Love - suspected of knowing the whereabouts of Cobain in the days prior to his death, and that he was planning to divorce her - and it reveals the case tapes made by Love's own PI, Tom Grant; a man on a mission to find the truth about Kurt Cobain's demise after becoming suspicious of Courtney's actions and the rushed police investigation. In addition, Cobain's grandfather goes public, charging that his grandson was murdered.

"Gripping . . . Cutter Wood subverts all our expectations for the true crime genre.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering When a stolen car is recovered on the Gulf Coast of Florida, it sets off a search for a missing woman, local motel owner Sabine Musil-Buehler. Three men are named persons of interest—her husband, her boyfriend, and the man who stole the car. Then the motel is set on fire; her boyfriend flees the county; and detectives begin digging on the beach of Anna Maria Island. Author Cutter Wood was a guest at Musil-Buehler’s motel as the search for her gained momentum. Driven by his own need to understand how a relationship could spin to pieces in such a fatal fashion, he began to talk with many of the people living on Anna Maria, and then with the detectives, and finally with the man presumed to be the murderer. But there was only so much that interviews and transcripts could reveal. In trying to understand how we treat those we love, this book, like Truman Capote’s classic In Cold Blood, tells a story that exists outside documentary evidence. Wood carries the investigation of Sabine’s murder beyond the facts of the case and into his own life, crafting a tale about the dark conflicts at the heart of every relationship.

Following the end of a romantic relationship, Lace is miserable and without hope. Longing to love but unable to make love stay, he turns his back on the most important of human emotions. Little does he know that a dark spirit waits in the shadows; through Lace's bitterness, the dark spirit finds power. Soon, it makes itself known to Lace, who is unable to reject the temptation. The spirit's name is Gormant, and he makes Lace a tempting offer. Lace must die to make it happen, but Gormant claims death is the easy part. As a spirit, Lace will be given limitless power to seek revenge on his enemies and on the women who once broke his heart. Thirsty for payback, Lace agrees to Gormant's terms, and the bloodbath begins. Only too late does Lace discover there's a human who truly loves him. By the time he learns of her feelings, though, Lace is too far under Gormant's influence to escape. Servant must battle master in order to stop a murderous rampage that will threaten the woman Lace now loves. Lace thought his humanity was gone, but by clinging to the love of a living, breathing woman, his lingering human feelings might be his greatest weapon.