“A brilliantly prophetic and modern tale of the macabre . . . A novel that roars across the intersection of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.” —James Wolcott, Vanity Fair columnist Unleashing the pent-up fury most Americans feel over the financial crisis, Brenda Cullerton’s wickedly riotous tale of an interior “desecrator” turned murderess is a flaming arrow into the dark heart of Manhattan’s filthy rich. Working on New York’s Upper East Side for phenomenally rich and frighteningly skinny women who are suffering from BBS (Birkin Bag Syndrome—a muscle ailment due to carrying heavy pocketbooks) has driven interior designer Charlotte Wolfe mad. It seems to her that the insatiable pursuit of luxury breeds monsters. She gets even angrier when she begins to encounter the same thing over and over again: these women are so cheap they go on Craigslist to sell things their husband kept from wife number one. As the financial crisis escalates and Charlotte’s own resources dwindle, her rage leads her to not only bite the well-manicured hands that feed her, but to do something more—to really clean house. A razor-sharp satire that’s both laugh-out-loud funny and edge-of-your-seat suspenseful, The Craigslist Murders will inspire readers to cheer an unlikely heroine, whose nightmares are the stuff of a poor person’s dreams.

The Craigslist Murders: Who's killing Manhattan's trophy wives?

Humor & Entertainment

Cullerton, Brenda

Humor

Melville International Crime

Assignment: Finding one of Argentina's 30,000 "Disappeared" ... likely outcome: Becoming one yourself. The Argentine army's "Dirty War" disappeared 30,000 people, and the last thing Pepe Carvalho wants is to investigate one of the vanished, even if that missing person is his cousin. But blood proves thicker than a fine Mendoza Cabernet Sauvignon, even for a jaded gourmand like Pepe, and so at his family's request he leaves Barcelona for Buenos Aires. What follows is perhaps Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's masterpiece: a combination white-knuckle investigation and moving psychological travelogue. Pepe quickly learns that "Buenos Aires is a beautiful city hell-bent on self-destruction," and finds himself on a trail involving boxers and scholars, military torturers and seductive semioticians, Borges fans and cold-blooded murderers. And despite the wonders of the Tango and the country's divine cuisine, he also knows one thing: He'll have to confront the traumas of Argentina's past head on if he wants not only to find his cousin, but simply stay alive.

The Buenos Aires Quintet (A Pepe Carvalho Mystery)

Literature & Fiction

VÁZQUEZ MONTALBÁN,MANUEL

Genre Fiction

At a meeting of the central committee of Spain's Communist Party, in a room both locked and guarded, general secretary Fernando Garrido is stabbed to death. But the Party refuses to believe it was an inside job. They turn to former member Pepe Carvalho. But he’s soon out of his depth in unfamiliar Madrid, where he spends nearly as much time investigating the chorizo, lamb-kidneys, and tripe, and the uninspiring selection of wine on offer, as he does murder. With time out for his signature book burning (Engels’s The Housing Question), cooking (shellfish risotto), and an ill-advised bajativo (cognac, crème de menthe) inspired romp with Gladys, Pepe Carvalho leads a wry and cynical tour through the labyrinth of post-Fascist Spanish politics amid violent jostling for power.

Murder in the Central Committee (A Pepe Carvalho Mystery)

Introducing one of crime fiction’s most legendary detectives, and greatest writers, to America When Antonio Jauma, a director of the multinational conglomerate Petnay, is murdered, his widow seeks out private investigator Pepe Carvalho, who had met and forgotten the playboy executive after their single chance encounter—back when Carvalho still worked for the CIA. Jauma was a “womanizer,” according to a friend, “of the least pleasant sense,” and the police have decided that the murder is the work of an unhappy pimp. But Carvalho doggedly pursues his own phlegmatic investigation, with time out for his signature book burning (Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reasoning; Sholokov’s And Quiet Flows the Don), cooking (leek soup and a freshly-caught steamed turbot), and running with his girlfriend Charo, whose last name he can’t remember.

The Angst-Ridden Executive (A Pepe Carvalho Mystery)

Literary

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. So, too, is KGB officer Nik Tsensky. They begin their investigations unbeknownst to each other, but quickly find themselves mystified about developments caused by the other. Thus begins a comedy of very dangerous errors as the two crisscross Europe, Russia, and the Ukraine, catalysts in a bizarre battle between the Russian and Ukrainian secret services. What ensues is simultaneously hilarious, tragic, and suspenseful, with a fascinating cast of characters who would seem absurd if they weren’t so compelling: a larger-than-life hitman, a deaf-and-dumb blonde, and a turtle. Then there’s the gun that shoots backwards... And as the two faithful investigators find themselves to be pawns in a story of post-Soviet collapse, it becomes—as usual in the work of this modern Russian master—an inspiring tale of resilience against the dark forces of the day.

The Case of the General's Thumb

Kurkov, Andrey

United States

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 death, and so didn’t get the kind of adulatory attention the previous four titles in the series got. The book has been unavailable for so long that many of Derek Raymond’s rabid fans aren’t even aware there is a fifth book. But Dead Man Upright may be the most psychologically probing book in the series. Unlike the others, it’s not so much an investigation into the identity of a killer, but a chase to catch him before he kills again. Meanwhile, the series’ hero—the nameless Sargent from the “Unexplained Deaths” department—is facing more obstacles in the department, due to severe budget cutbacks, than he’s ever faced before. However, this time, the Sargent knows the identity of the next victim of the serial killer in question. But even the Sargent’s brutally blunt way of speaking can’t convince the besotted victim, and he’s got to convince a colleague to go against orders and join him in the attempt to catch the killer... before it’s too late.

Dead Man Upright (Factory 5)

RAYMOND, Derek

Introducing one of Europe's most widely popular detective series Wanting out of high-stress detective work, Simon Brenner takes a calming job as a chauffeur, shuttling a two-year-old girl back and forth in a soothing ride along the Autobahn between her father, a construction tycoon in Munich, and her mother, an abortion doctor in Vienna. Except then one day he stops at a gas station to buy the little girl a chocolate bar and comes back to find she’s been kidnapped . . . and suddenly he’s out of a job, thoroughly stressed out, and a detective again. With no shortage of leads—both the father’s latest development and the mother’s clinic are under siege by protestors—Brenner makes his way through a powerful cast of characters and a growing pile of bodies to solve the crime in the only way he knows how: By being in precisely the right place at the worst possible time. Told with sharp-edged wit, suspense that’s even sharper, and one of the most quirky, hilarious, and compelling narrative voices ever.

Brenner and God

Haas, Wolf

Barcelona’s new soccer star is receiving death threats and Pepe Carvalho, gourmet gumshoe and former political prisoner under Franco, is hired to find out who’s behind it. Pepe Carvalho is set to retire. Content to live out the rest of his days enjoying the best food and wine Catalonia has to offer, his plans are put on hold when an executive from Barcelona's world-famous soccer team pays him a visit. “The center forward will be killed at dusk,” reads the note the executive gives to Carvalho. With that, the detective, former communist, and one-time employee of the CIA, must find out where this note is from. Is the threat real? Is it the work of one person? Or is it one of the real estate moguls tearing Barcelona apart in their battle over the most important properties of Catalonia? Here Montalbán does for the game of soccer what he has done for food. In an exquisite portrait of Spain’s most beloved sport, soccer and politics mix in a gripping mystery about the reckless excesses—and limits—of power.

Off Side (A Pepe Carvalho Mystery)

Barcelona detective Pepe Carvalho’s radical past catches up with him when a powerful businessman—a patron of artists and activists—is found dead after going missing for a year. In search of the spirit of Paul Gauguin, Stuart Pedrell—eccentric Barcelona businessman, construction magnate, dreamer, and patron of poets and painters—disappeared not long after announcing plans to travel to the South Pacific. A year later he is found stabbed to death at a construction site in Barcelona. Gourmand gumshoe Pepe Carvalho is hired by Pedrell’s wife to find out what happened. Carvalho, a jaded former communist, must travel through circles of the old anti-Franco left wing on the trail of the killer. But with little appetite for politics, Carvalho also leads us on a tour through literature, cuisine, and the criminal underbelly of Barcelona in a typically brilliant twist on the genre by a Spanish master.

Southern Seas (A Pepe Carvalho Mystery)

On the evening of October 17, 1961 twenty-thousand Algerians marched in Paris in defiance of and in protest against a curfew imposed by Maurice Papon, chief of the Paris Metropolitan Police. The protesters were met with ferocious and uninhibited violence. Eleven-thousand were arrested; more than one thousand injured; as many as three hundred were killed, many of them thrown into the Seine, from which their bodies were later recovered. In recreating the scene of the atrocities in Murder in Memoriam, his controversial alarum first published in 1984, Didier Daeninckx introduces a fictional observer of the riot, Roger Thiraud, a middle-aged history teacher in a public school, only steps from his home and his waiting, pregnant wife. In the first few minutes of the demonstration, he will be assassinated, in cold blood, by a member of the anti-terrorist secret police. For nearly forty years after October 1961, France would deny the killings. Upon the independence of Algeria in 1962 an amnesty put its perpetrators safely beyond prosecution. The records were buried. In 1981, Bernard Thiraud, Roger's son, is researching the archives in Toulouse, intent on completing his father's history of his birthplace, Drancy, now notorious as the site of a detention and transit camp from which Jews were deported to Auschwitz. One afternoon, after leaving the town hall, he too is murdered -- the victim of what appears to investigating officers to be a professional killing. When inspector Cadin of the Toulouse prefecture learns of the unsolved murder of the young man's father, he suspects a connection. But why would anybody want to kill two bourgeois, politically unconnected history teachers? Didier Daeninckx has located the link between the two murders in the history that France had yet to confront -- in its colonial racism and its complicity in genocide. Daeninckx made this connection in fiction, deliberately provoking its acknowledgment in fact. Murder in Memoriam anticipated by more than a decade the shocking revelations provided by the exposure, trial, and conviction of Maurice Papon -- the Parisian chief of police in 1961, and the never-named villain whose real crimes, unrevealed at the time of its first publication, haunt this account -- for crimes against humanity; for his part in the administration of the deportation of the Jews from Bordeaux to Auschwitz.

Murder In Memoriam

DAENINCKX, DIDIER

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