Trade Paperback Fiction to Die For
Discover must-read trade paperback fiction books that will captivate you. Explore our curated list of top fiction paperbacks for your next thrilling read.
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Dead Ringer
by Ken Douglas
"Maggie Nesbitt is pregnant and depressed, because her husband isn't the father of her unborn child. She's thinking about abortion when she's attacked on the beach. She barely gets away, then gets the shock of her life the next morning when she sees that she has been killed on the news and that her nude body had been dumped in the trash behind a beachside bar. She finds out the body behind the bar is the twin sister she'd been told had died when she was two weeks old. She also learns her twin was divorced from a horrid man and that she had an eight-year-old daughter, Jasmine. Maggie, showing a bump on her head she got while getting away from her attackers, claims partial amnesia and steps into her dead twin's life. This way she can have her baby, give it a home, and save Jasmine from having to go and live with her father. But she doesn't know her twin saw someone do murder. And that someone thinks he's killed the wrong woman."--Publisher description
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Foul Matter
by Martha Grimes
The bestselling author of the Richard Jury novels delivers a razor-sharp and raucously funny send-up of the cutthroat world of publishing Paul is a struggling writer navigating the treacherous landscape of editors and literary agents. When he hires the infamous Mackenzie Haack as his publisher, he's plunged into a whirlwind of chaotic decisions and questionable choices. But as Paul dives deeper into the murky waters of the book publishing business, he becomes entangled in a murder plot that threatens to unravel everything.
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The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
by John le Carre
Featuring an Introduction by the author, the crowning Cold War masterwork is once again available in a collector's trade edition.
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Scorpion
by Jack Stewart
DEA agent Bill Broxton is assigned to protect the Prime Minister of Trinidad from an assassin. He doesn't know that his fiancée is the killer.
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Exile
by Denise Mina
In the exciting follow-up to the author's Garnethill, Maureen O'Donnell is once again investigating murder in the dirty little corners of Glasgow, when one of her clients at the local women's shelter turns up dead. Reprint.
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Rat City
by Curt Colbert
Rat City's the sort of town where a man can't even be sure of a good breakfast. At least that's what detective Jake Rossiter learns when the homicide-minded Big Ed drops by Rossiter's office one morning to punch our boy's ticket. Rossiter's not one to go out easy, though, and he manages to send Big Ed to the floor with a bullet in his chest. But who is Big Ed, anyway, and why does he want Rossiter pushing up daisies? With the help of his able-bodied gal Friday, Miss Jenkins, Rossiter digs through layers of vice and violence in Seattle's seamy underbelly until he uncovers a case of corruption and prejudice that pits him toe-to-toe with hysterical dames, out-of-town muscle, and the entire Rat City Police force.
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The Hustler
by Perseus
Fast Eddie Felson--young, sure of himself, and considered by some to be one of the best pool hustlers around--sets out from California to Chicago until he meets his match in the undefeated Minnesota Fats. Reissue.
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The Color of Money
by Perseus
After 20 years of hibernation, former pool champion "Fast" Eddie Felson is playing exhibition matches with former rival Minnesota Fats in shopping malls for prizes like cable television. With one failed marriage and years of running a pool hall, Eddie is now ready to regain the skills needed to compete in a world of pool that has changed dramatically since he left it behind. The real challenge comes when Eddie realizes that in order to compete successfully, he must hone his skills in the game of nine-ball as opposed to the straight pool that had once won him fame. With a new generation of competitors, fear and doubt and the daily possibility of failure arise, giving Fast Eddie a new challenge to overcome. The Color of Money is the source of the 1986 film starring Paul Newman in the role he had originated in The Hustler.
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A Landing on the Sun
by Michael Frayn
From the bestselling author of Headlong and Spies, "an unconditional triumph" (The Washington Post Book World) For fifteen years, ever since the taciturn civil servant Summerchild fell to his death from a window in the Admiralty, there have been rumors. So Brian Jessel, a young member of the Cabinet Office, is diverted from his routine work and asked to prepare an internal report. Slowly, from the archives in the Cabinet Office Registry, Jessel begins to reconstruct Summerchild's last months. It begins to emerge that, at a time when America had just put men on the moon, the British were involved in an even bolder project, and that Summerchild was investigating a phenomenon as common as sunlight, but as powerful and dangerous as any of the forces that modern science has known. The secret world into which Brian Jessel stumbles turns out to be even more extraordinary than his department had feared.
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The Trick of It
by Michael Frayn
Written in a form of protagonist's letters to his Australian friend, this novel is a subtle and psychologically exact depiction of the moral degradation of an ordinary man afflicted with envy.
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Lie in the Dark
by Dan Fesperman
"A mystery tinged by the politics of today...Brutally realistic." --U.S. News & World Report Dan Fesperman, a journalist who reported from a number of war zones, has written a masterful murder mystery in the vein of early le Carré and Graham Greene. Vlado Petric is a homicide investigator in war-torn Sarajevo. When he encounters an unidentified body near "sniper alley," he realizes that it is the body of Esmir Vitas, chief of the Interior Ministry's special police, and that Vitas has been killed not by any sniper's aim but by a bullet fired at almost pointblank range. Searching for the killer in this "city of murderers," Petric finds himself drawn into a conspriacy, the scope of which goes beyond anything he could possibly have imagined.
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The Big Killing
by Robert Wilson
Bruce Medway finds himself in over his head in trouble when he is asked to deliver a video to an unknown location, a task that leads to a shootout and to the discovery of a mutilated body, and to serve as bodyguard to Ron Collins, a spoiled playboy searching for diamonds in the Ivory Coast. Original. 40,000 first printing.
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Flinch
by Robert Ferrigno
Frightening, feral, and funny, Flinch is a fast-paced noir set amid the frenzied freak show of Southern California. Tabloid journalist Jimmy Gage and his plastic-surgeon brother, Jonathan, have long had a twisted and sometimes nearly fatal rivalry, but the ante was upped when Jonathan recently married Jimmy’s ex. So when Jimmy begins to suspect that Jonathan is the serial killer known as The Eggman, he’s neither surprised nor displeased. What ensues is this harried and hard-edged whodunnit that involves everything from petty porn stars to WWF wannabes to gut-wrenchingly gruesome gangsters and gang lords. Flinch is an intricately plotted whirlwind of a tale that will grip you until the very last page.
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Done for a Dime
by David Corbett
Raymond “Strong” Carlisle made his mark as an ace sideman to the biggest names in R&B. Now he lies in the mud outside his home, shot dead from behind. He’s the first official casualty in a dirty war for control of Rio Mirada: a low-rent “city in transition” at the northernmost point of the San Francisco Bay, beset by drug dealers, arsonists, squatters, and restless developers. And now a murderer. In Rio Mirada, the truth is in short supply. What’s plentiful are people with all the reasons in the world to make sure the murder of Strong Carlisle remains unsolved. And the harder Detective Dennis Murchison pushes for answers, the clearer it becomes that this single, brutal homicide is just the tip of an iceberg in a town where small-time crime and big-time corruption are about to collide with explosive consequences.
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Shooting Elvis
by Robert M. Eversz
In California a woman photographer is conned by her handsome Harley-riding boyfriend to deliver a package to Los Angeles airport. When the package explodes--she was set up--the lady decides to bring the terrorists to justice. A pop noir novel by the author of False Profit.
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Burning Garbo
by Robert Eversz
On the morning of her thirtieth birthday, ex-con-turned-paparazza Nina Zero scales the Malibu hillside above the estate of a reclusive film star who hasn't been seen in a decade. Within the next few hours, a mysterious gunman shoots her, a deadly brushfire almost smokes her, an arson investigator accuses her, and a toothless Rottweiler adopts her as his new best friend. Accompanied by the toothless Rott, Zero goes on the hunt, compelled to prove that someone else set fire to the star's estate to keep the cops from jailing her for arson and -- when charred bones are discovered in the ashes -- murder. The killers are equally interested in finding her, and their desperation escalates to a bone-chilling series of violent encounters in which Nina plays hunter one moment and prey the next.
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The White Lioness
by Henning Mankell
The mystery thriller series that inspired the Netflix crime drama Young Wallander • From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the third riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series. The execution-style murder of a Swedish housewife looks like a simple case even though there is no obvious suspect. But then Wallander learns of a determined stalker, and soon enough, the cops catch up with him. But when his alibi turns out to be airtight, they realize that what seemed a simple crime of passion is actually far more complex—and dangerous. The search for the truth behind the killing eventually uncovers an assassination plot, and Wallander soon finds himself in a tangle with both the secret police and a ruthless foreign agent. Combining compelling insights into the sinister side of modern life with a riveting tale of international intrigue, The White Lioness keeps you on the knife-edge of suspense.
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Oyster
by Janette Turner Hospital
The awful secrets kept by the residents of the remote Australian town of Outer Maroo are finally revealed when a couple arrives searching for their children who have become followers of Oyster, a sinister, fanatical cult leader.
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Too Dead to Swing
by Hal Glatzer
It's 1940, and musician Katy Green gets what ought to be a dream gig, playing with the Ultra Belles, an all-female swing band. They travel by Pullman on the luxurious Starlight from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz, Lake Tahoe and San Francisco. So what if the songwriter is Katy's ex-boyfriend, and a notorious Casanova? So what if half the women are mad at the other half over politics, music, and sex? There are tensions and rivalries in every band. But that's not the worst of it. Katy quickly discovers that somebody's out for blood.
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Chasing the Devil's Tail
by David Fulmer
In New Orleans's red light district in the early twentieth century, politician Tom Anderson hires Creole detective Valentin St. Cyr to investigate the deaths of several prostitutes, each of whom is found with a black rose. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
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The Guards
by Ken Bruen
In this mesmerizing work of crime fiction, an ex-member of The Guards--Ireland's police force--is approached in a Galway bar by a dazzling woman with a strange request and a rumor about his talent for finding things.
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Murder in the Bastille
by Cara Black
Parisian P.I. Aimée Leduc is attacked and blinded during an investigation. Can she solve her case without her sight—and when her own life is in danger? Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc is all dressed up in her new Chinese silk jacket, supposedly a designer’s “exclusive,” for dinner with a difficult client at an elegant restaurant in the Bastille district. She is chagrined to see that the woman seated at the very next table is wearing an identical jacket. When the woman leaves her cell phone on the table, Aimée follows her to return it and is attacked in the shadowy Passage Boule Blanche. When she regains consciousness, Aimée finds that she is blind. Nevertheless, she is told she is lucky; the woman she was following was found in the next passage, murdered. Aimée is determined to identify her attacker. Was he actually a serial killer targeting showy blondes, as the police insist? Was he really after the other woman? Or was Aimée his intended victim?