April Publications

Shamus-winner Max Allan Collins and crime-novel king Mickey Spillane team up to co-edit A Century of Noir: Thirty-two Classic Crime Stories, a collection that includes tales by the aforementioned as well as by luminaries such as Chester Himes, James M. Cain, Donald E. Westlake, Sara Paretsky and Evan Hunter. It may not actually span a century, but this volume offers plenty of blood, booze and cigarette smoke in worlds populated by flinty men and fetching women. (New American Library, $15 paper 528p ISBN 0-451-20596-0)

The WorldKrime series from Intrigue gets another installment with Detective Lauriant Investigates, a volume comprised of two short novels featuring the titular hard-drinking, hard-working gruff guy with a heart of gold investigating crime in 1960s France. In Death in a Ditch, Graham R. Wood's hero searches for the killer of a strange antiques dealer; in Murder in the Vendee, he must determine if a Count's son was also his killer. (Intrigue [www.intriguepress.com], $23.95 384p ISBN 1-890768-44-8)

"Somebody was killing the sleazy lawyers of Los Angeles. In the beginning, hardly anyone even noticed," begins Taffy Cannon's (Guns and Roses) sharply clever Open Season on Lawyers. LAPD homicide detective Joanna Davis pursues a murderer whose vengeance takes strange parallels to the lawyers' perceived crimes (a lawyer who defended a caterer against charges of food poisoning later dies of it, for example); readers just might be torn between wanting her to catch him and wanting him to get away. (Daniel & Daniel/Perseverance [www.danielpublishing.com], $13.95 paper 288p ISBN 1-880284-51-0)

Amateur detective and professional musician Katy Green has her work cut out for her: not only does she have to play the violin for—and negotiate fights between—other members of the Ultra Belles, an all-girl swing band, she also has to figure out who's behind a growing list of mysterious deaths. Hal Glatzer's Too Dead to Swing is a strong debut, and the book has a tale of its own: it's based on a story from the late 1940s by mystery ghost-writer Hanna Dobryn, who willed her Katy Green mysteries to Glatzer on the condition he see them into print. (Daniel & Daniel/Perseverance, $13.95 paper 240p ISBN 1-880284-53-7)

Edgar-winner (for best short story) Wendy Hornsby gathers 10 stories and one essay into her Nine Sons: Collected Mysteries, which offers readers both whodunit thrills and thoughtful explorations into the darker regions of the human heart. Former LAPD officer Mike Flint—sometime boyfriend of Hornsby's heroine in her Maggie McGowan series—makes an appearance here, as he reflects on his career, his new home and how some cases—including a mysterious car accident he's called to examine—never get solved. (Crippen & Landru [www.cripppenlandru.com], $42 cloth $16 paper 185p ISBN 1-885941-65-X, -66-8)

March Publications

In his dark—and, it must be said, rather warped—Private Justice, attorney and former PI Richard Sand presents a second Lucas Rook mystery after 2000's Tunnel Runner. Having avenged his brother's death in the first book, Rook has retired from the NYPD to work for a mobster whose daughter was murdered; as more girls get killed, Rook finds himself dealing with a host of bizarre characters—a cat lady, a deformed piano teacher and a pedophile who works at a cheese counter—and racing against the clock to discover who's to blame before another girl is murdered. (Durban [www.durbanhouse.com], $15.95 paper 248p ISBN 1-930754-16-7)

Reformed Glaswegian gangster Hugh Collins (he was released from prison in 1992 after serving 16 years for murder) has a two-part autobiography under his belt; his latest effort takes the form of a fast-paced, corpse-strewn crime novel full of '70s-style double-crossing rogues bantering and conning each other in thick vernacular. "In an oot. Canny go wrang," you say? Old-timer Barney Boone finds out that plenty can go wrong as small-time thievery escalates into murder and mayhem in No Smoke, the first installment of a trilogy set in the underbelly of Scotland's grittiest city. (Canongate [www.canongate.net], $14 paper 256p ISBN 1-84195-116-1)

Norbert Davis committed suicide in 1949, but his incomparable crime-fighting duo, Doan, the tippling private eye, and Carstairs, the huge and preternaturally clever Great Dane, march on in a re-release of the 1943 Sally's in the Alley, the second book in the dog-detective trilogy. Doan's on a government-sponsored mission to find an ore deposit in the Mojave Desert, but he's got to manage an odd (and oddly named) bunch of characters—Dust-Mouth Haggerty knows where the mine is but isn't telling; Doc Gravelmeyer's learning how undertaking can be a "growth industry"; and film star Susan Sally's days are numbered—in an old-fashioned romp that matches its bloody crimes with belly laughs. (Rue Morgue [P.O. Box 4119, Boulder, Colo. 80306], $14 paper 122p ISBN 0-915230-46-1)