James Lee Burke is in a class of his own for his highly acclaimed, award-winning noir fiction, most notably the Dave Robicheaux series set in Louisiana. Now the very best of his recent short stories have been gathered together in one collection. Burke paints a vivid picture of 1940s and 1950s Texas and Louisiana, from heartbreaking childhood reminiscences to death on an oil drilling barge and betrayal within a rock 'n' roll band. And as you would expect of a writer who cares passionately about his fellow man as well as the environment, the more contemporary stories deal with the devastation left by a hurricane - the despair of those stranded or left widowed by the disaster. Here is the first collection for ten years of stories by a modern master. Become lost in the melancholy beauty of James Lee Burke's writing in this remarkable assortment of tales.

'Death is my beat.' Those words, spoken by the narrator and hero of THE POET, Jack McEvoy, could also apply to Michael Connelly. Time and time again in these riveting pieces, we make the connection between Connelly the crime reporter and Connelly the novelist: 'On the day I arrived in Los Angeles I sat in the newspaper editor's office being interviewed for a job on the crime beat. The day before there had been a bank heist in which the thieves had gone into the city's labyrinthine storm water tunnel system to get beneath the bank before tunnelling upward.' Years later that story would become THE BLACK ECHO. 'Moments. They kept coming. One morning an editor called me and told me to swing by a murder scene on my way to the office. Just like that, like I was picking up a coffee on the way to work. The murder was on Woodrow Wilson Drive in the Hollywood Hills. I went as instructed and got the story. I also got the place where I would put the home of the fictional detective [Harry Bosch] I had secretly begun writing about ...' The cops, the killers, the cases - it's all here in a collection that will a MUST for Connelly fans.

'I can't afford to come back from the dead.' Annabelle has had many names in her life - Sally, Cindy, Lucille. Though her father moved her from city to city from the age of ten, changing names, houses, careers and histories every few months, Annabelle never knew what they were running from. Now in her thirties, with both parents dead, she's settled in Boston. But old habits die hard and she still looks over her shoulder when she leaves her apartment, still blends in with the crowd on the subway. Then at the Boston State Mental Hospital a multiple grave is discovered. Six young girls left to die in an underground chamber decades ago, while their captor looked on. When her original name appears in the paper, wrongly identifying her as one of the dead girls, Annabelle finally knows. This was the work of the monster her father fled from. But the killer is still on the loose. And he's looked for her for a very long time. Bobby Dodge has been haunted by the Catherine Gagnon case for years. It nearly cost him his job and his sanity. As a child, Catherine was also held prisoner underground, like the victims in this latest case. But Catherine's captor was in prison when these girls were taken. Yet the similarities are too numerous to be just coincidence...

Timothy Van Bender, Yale graduate and hedge fund manager in Palo Alto, lives a magical life: his business mints money; he wife, Katherine, is beautiful and charming; his young sexy secretary, Tricia, greets him each morning with a flirtatious smile. Then, one Tuesday, everything changes. Timothy wakes to learn that his hedge fund has lost $24 million on a bad bet against the Japanese Yen. Timothy decides to double down and bet again. But the Yen keeps climbing, and his business investors start asking questions. With his company on the brink of collapse, he gets a call from his wife, who phones to say goodbye, moments before jumping off a cliff at Big Sur to her death. Timothy can't believe it, and nor, for that matter, can the local police. And that's when his troubles start. As the police investigate Timothy, he investigates his dead wife's secrets. But when Tricia shows up on Timothy's doorstep, claiming to be his dead wife, and knowing secrets that only Katherine could know, Timothy's not sure what, or whom, to believe. Has he been given a second chance at happiness or is he being played for a fool in an elaborate scam that may cost him his life?