Melville House: 350 books

The wry and rueful Columbo of Austria investigates a grisly murder at a beloved restaurant where snooty Viennese gourmands go to eat … fried chicken. At a wildly popular chicken shack in the Austrian countryside, a gruesome discovery is made in the pile of chicken bones waiting to be fed...

Two cops—one American, one Kenyan—team up to track down a deadly terrorist. It’s December 2007. The Kenyan presidential elections have gotten off to a troubled start, with threats of ethnic violence in the air, and the reports about Barack Obama on the campaign trail in the United States...

“Kemal Kayankaya is the ultimate outsider among hard-boiled private eyes.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review OVER 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE When a Turkish laborer is stabbed to death in Frankfurt's red light district, the local polcie see no need to work overtime....

The fourth volume in the Inspector Eberhard Mock Quintet, the series called "As Noir as it gets" by the The Independent. When Abwehr Captain Eberhard Mock is called from his New Year's Eve revelries to attend a particularly grisly crime scene, his notoriously robust stomach is turned....

Penguin Lost finds Viktor Zolotaryov sneaking back into Kiev under an assumed identity to undertake a dangerous mission: He wants to find Misha, his penguin, whom he fears has fallen into the hands of the criminal mob looking for Viktor himself. Guilt-ridden and determined to do what it takes,...

John Le Carré meets Mikhail Bulgakov in this international crime thriller by the author of the acclaimed Death and the Penguin The corpse of a distinguished general is found attached to an advertising balloon—and minus his thumb. Police Lieutenant Viktor Slutsky is sent in to investigate....

Never before available in the U.S., the final episode in the Factory Series is another unrelenting investigation with the nameless detective into the black soul of Thatcher’s England. The fifth and final book in the author’s acclaimed Factory Series was published just after Derek Raymond’s...

Another dose of hilarity and mayhem from the author Carl Hiaasen calls “the real deal” In this winner of the German Thriller Prize, ex-cop Simon Brenner, as part of his never-ending quest to get as far away from being a cop as he can, takes a job as an ambulance driver in downtown Vienna. It’s...

“Kemal Kayankaya is the ultimate outsider among hard-boiled private eyes.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review OVER 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE ** ** As a Turkish immigrant raised by Germans, he's regularly subjected to racism in the gritty, working-class city, and getting...

“Kemal Kayankaya is the ultimate outsider among hard-boiled private eyes.” **—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review OVER 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE Turkish detective Kemal Kayankaya might not know when it’s recycling day, but now he has to help four eco-terrorists...

Introducing a gritty new detective series set in the bleak hinterlands of upstate new York Washed-up private investigator Eliot Conte would rather be teaching American literature and listening to opera than taking pictures of spouses in flagrante delicto. But he flamed out of an academic career...

**“Vivid and unnerving . . . Eliot Conte is an instant original.” —The Washington Post Someone's shooting dogs in Utica . . .** Ex-PI Eliot Conte (“part Mike Hammer and part William S. Burroughs,” according to The Washington Post) thought he’d escapedthe sordid underworld...

International intrigue, murderous politics, and psychological suspense combine in a stylish literary thriller   An enigmatic Israeli who calls himself Shakespeare – because he’s got a way with words – finds himself jolted on a sidewalk in Manhattan: Is that who I think it is, he wonders, or...

The history of the vocoder: how popular music hijacked the Pentagon's speech scrambling weapon The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from eavesdroppers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it was repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians, and is now the...