Featuring the best from the modern masters of detective, intrigue, suspense, and mystery fiction.
Featuring the best from the modern masters of detective, intrigue, suspense, and mystery fiction.
An anthology of stories edited by Michael Connelly
Las Vegas. Lost Wages. Sin City. An artificial oasis of pleasure, spectacle, and entertainment, the gambling capital of America has reinvented itself so many times that its doubtful that anyone knows for sure what's real and what isn't in the miles of neon and scorching heat. Las Vegas is considered the ultimate players destination-no matter what your game. Almost anything is available-for a price, mind you, and sometimes losers walk away from the tables with even less than just an empty wallet or purse-sometimes they don't walk away at all.
Now the International Association of Crime Writers and New York Times-bestselling author Michael Connelly have gathered twenty-two crime and mystery stories about the ultimate playground, Las Vegas, and what can happen behind the glitz and glamour. From a gambler who must-must-win at the roulette table to stay alive to a courier who's only mistake was accepting a package with Las Vegas as the final destination, come to the true city that never sleeps, where fortunes are made and lost every day, and where snake-eyes aren't found just on a pair of dice.
Featuring stories by:James Swain, S.J. Rozan, Wendy Hornsby, Michael Collins, T.P Keating, J. Madison Davis, Sue Pike, Joan Richter, Libby Hellmann, Tom Savage, Edward Wellen, K.j.a. Wishnia, Linda Kerslake, John Wessel, Lise McClendon, Ronnie Klaskin, Ruth Cavin, A.B. Robbins, Gay Toltl Kinman, Micki Marz, Rick Mofina, Jeremiah Healy
From Booker-shortlisted Irish author, two families living the dream in small town America are forced to confront their guilty secrets in the aftermath of a shocking death.
This is just after the financial crash — people are beginning to discover the depth of the mess and all of a sudden the American dream is beginning to look tawdry. Michael Collins’s bravura novel begins with a spectacular death on a highway as a woman choses to drive off a bridge into a lake rather than face the reality of a recent cancer diagnosis.
It soon emerges that the cancer diagnosis is not the only secret the woman has been hiding. When her husband dies soon after, the real nature of an apparently happy marriage is inexorably exposed, adultery, lies, corruption, the list goes on, and the couple’s son Norman has to somehow make sense of it all.
Norman finds the life he has carefully constructed for himself decompose, and in the process mirrors the need for realignment that the greater world also has to face. He makes the unexpected discovery of the real treasures of life; in Norman’s case, love, and a brother he never imagined existed.
An anthology of stories
A new anthology of twenty-nine short stories features an array of baffling locked-room mysteries by Michael Collins, Bill Pronzini, Susanna Gregory, H. R. F. Keating, Peter Lovesey, Kate Ellis, and Lawrence Block, among others.