There is no writer better placed than James Lee Burke to take on this territory. The Tin Roof Blow-Down features a motley group of characters whose stories weave in and out of each other as the storm turns the Big Easy into a lawless wasteland of apocalyptic proportions. The nightmarish landscape created by Katrina seems the perfect setting for Burke's almost Biblical visions of good and evil - it is as if he had to wait for this disaster to find the occasion to match his emotionally supercharged prose. You can feel the undercurrents of rage and pain beneath the narrative, making this not only his most personal and deeply felt book for some time, but quite possibly his best novel to date. This is not just a crime novel, it is potentially THE fictional chronicle of a disaster whose human dimensions America is still struggling to process.

Robert Crais's masterpiece. He joins the list of elite thriller writers with a massive novel of violence and revenge, friendship and love; in a city at war with itself.

In the biggest and best thriller yet from Robert Crais, Elvis Cole wisecracking, Vietnam vet PI - and Joe Pike - vegetarian, ex-marine and walking arsenal - are drawn into a case of police corruption and cold-blooded evil that threatens to destroy their friendship. Maybe even Pike's life.

When the body of Joe Pike's ex-girlfriend is found, her father, distrustful of the LAPD, asks Pike and Cole to shadow the investigation into her death. Cole soon discovers that the girl was a victim of a serial killer; a fact hushed up by the police. Desperate for a result, and with seemingly little hope of finding the killer, the LAPD attempt to set up one of the men who discovered the body. Cole and Pike find themselves drawn into a nightmare world where police corruption and incompetence vie with the old wounds of past brutality to ruin everyone's lives - from their own, to the dead woman's grieving father and an ambitious young female LAPD detective. And as the investigation progresses, a silent killer is methodically murdering key witnesses, moving closer and closer to Pike and Cole, eventually convincing the police that Pike is the killer.

A masterpiece of sustained tension, threatened violence and the grim reality of police malpractice, L A Requiem is shot through with the redeeming power of love and friendship. Elvis Cole's own inimitable wit is never more poignant as he faces his worst crises yet.