Maxima Library

Toussaint Boudreaux, a docker — hardworking and looking for a break — earns extra cash as a prize fighter. But the only break he gets lands him in gaol and then on a chain gang. Avery Broussard, wayward son of an old plantation family, loses his freedom for a cartload of Prohibition moonshine and finds himself attached to the same work camp as Boudreaux. Neither would have chosen the life — blood, sweat and tears come with the territory — but each is determined to make the best of it or find a way out. HALF OF PARADISE is a powerful novel of people from very different backgrounds who find their destinies tragically intertwined.

MWA Grandmaster Burke spins a tale replete with colorful prose and epic confrontations in his second novel to feature smalltown Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland (after Lay Down My Sword and Shield). An anonymous phone call leads Holland, a Korean vet who survived a POW camp, to the massacre and burial site of nine Thai women, a crime that brings FBI and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials running. As a slew of bad guys relocated from New Orleans after Katrina grapple for advantage in new territory, mercurial killer Preacher Jack Collins finds plenty of work. Pete Flores, a possible witness to the massacre, and his girlfriend are targeted by Collins for elimination, and by the FBI for bait. Holland must protect the hapless Flores and his girl from both. Three strong female characters complement the full roster of sharply drawn lowlifes. The battle of wills and wits between Holland and Collins delivers everything Burke's fans expect.

An anthology of stories edited by Laura Lippman and Otto Penzler

"With so many great authors contributing to this fiction collection… it doesn't take detecting skills to discover the gem. And every story dazzles… These stories, in prose both elegant and compelling, get to the heart of why people do what they do." – USA Today

The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 will be selected by "writing powerhouse" (USA Today) Laura Lippman. With her popular Tess Monaghan series and her New York Times best-selling standalone novels, Lippman has greatly expanded the boundaries of modern mystery fiction and psychological suspense.

#1 New York Times best-selling author of the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels, Louise Penny brings her “nerve and skill—as well as heart” (Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post) to selecting the best short mystery and crime fiction of the year.

In his introduction to the The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, 'noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction. It's the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It's the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad.' Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction.

James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, series editor of the annual The Best American Mystery Stories, mined one hundred years of writing - 1910-2010 - to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's 'Pastorale,' and its post-war heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing in the last decade.

Iry Paret's done his time — two years for manslaughter in Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary. Now the war vet and blues singer is headed to Montana, where he hopes to live clean working on a ranch owned by the father of his prison pal, Buddy Riordan. In prison, Iry tinkered with a song — “The Lost Get-Back Boogie” — that never came out quite right. Now, the Riordan family's problems hand him a new kind of trouble, with some tragic consequences. And Iry must get the tune right at last, or pay a fateful price.

Everyone tried to put them under — Indians, French prison guards, bounty hunters — and the whole Mexican army!

A narrow escape from a Louisiana penal colony and a hazardous trek south and west made fast friends of young Tennessean Son Holland and Hugh Allison — a tough old mercenary who knew every trick of survival in the wild land and could read a man 200 yards away on horseback.

Kicking up dust through the open plains of Texas, they fought, stole, hid out with Choctaws, and killer their way to Sam Houston's army — to rout Santa Anna and his Mexican hordes, and avenge the Alamo!

'White doves come at morning Where my soldier sleeps in the ground. I placed my ring in his coffin, The trees o'er his grave have all turned brown.' Set mainly in Louisiana during the years 1861 1868, this passionate novel of men, women and war tells the story of the author's ancestor, Confederate soldier Willie Burke. A classic Burke hero, innately moral to the point of lunacy, Willie is soon in conflict with his superiors. As his best friend Jim Stubblefield observes: 'the juncture of Willie Burke and the Confederate Army is akin to the meeting of a wrecking ball and a crystal shop.' The characters who people these pages, many of them based on real historical figures, are as memorable as any Burke has created. Mulatto, Flower Jamison, victim of terrible abuse that never touches her soul, determined to better herself; Quaker abolitionist Abigail Dowling, whose Unionist sympathies put her in constant danger; Colonel Ira Jamison, rotten to his core yet who would rise from a cesspit smelling of roses; these and many others stay powerfully in the mind in this epic tale. Like all the best war novels, WHITE DOVES AT MORNING concentrates not on battles but on the edges of grand events, the detritus that wars create, the human cost, and, in this case, the terrible aftermath.