Jessica Fletcher knows that creativity must be nurtured. So when a young lady from Cabot Cove shows promise as a singer and songwriter, Jessica and a local citizens committee send Cyndi on a scholarship trip to Nashville, Tennessee, where she can benefit from professional instruction. Only weeks later, Cabot Cove is shocked to hear of the cold-blooded murder of a brash country music publisher -- by the young talent Cyndi! And as Cyndi's mother begs Jessica to help her daughter, Jess heads to the country music capital of the world to help the wayward starlet. Jessica finds that the murdered man was no country gentleman, with a list of ex-wives, cheated partners, swindled singers, and stolen songs that has Jessica swinging to-and-fro in the search for a killer. And if she can't uncover the culprit soon, Jessica knows that poor Cyndi will never get the chance for an encore ...

“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story . . . is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!” ―Lisa Jackson, New York Times–bestselling author Crime comes to the capital of country music in these all-new stories by mystery and thriller stars including Jeffery Deaver, Anne Perry, Robert Dugoni, Donald Bain, Jefferson Bass, and many more. “Settings include backwoods hollows, late-night recording studios, seedy dives, quiet suburbs, sleek yachts, and tropical islands. Readers will meet Civil War re-enactors, college professors, song writers, spies, and the requisite lawyers and cops, as well as a being that just might be the devil. Among the highlights are Anne Perry’s ‘Shutter Speed,’ which takes the reader back in time to the fashionable haunts of 1930s British aristocracy, with Wallis Simpson and Edward, Prince of Wales, putting in an appearance. In ‘Regression,’ Jeffery Deaver offers a fresh and frightening look at the potential benefits and pitfalls of successful psychiatric treatment, and Mary Burton warms up a cold case in ‘The Keepsake.’ This is a book to keep by your bedside for those nighttime short story cravings.” —Publishers Weekly Includes stories by Jefferson Bass, Catriona McPherson, Baron R. Birtcher, Donald Bain, C. Hope Clark, Jonathan Stone, Maggie Toussaint, Jeffery Deaver, Blake Fontenay, Jon Jefferson, Anne Perry, Heywood Gould, Dana Chamblee Carpenter, Mary Burton, Jaden Terrell, Robert Dugoni & Paula Gail Benson, Eyre Price, Steven James, Daco, and Clay Stafford

Weeks after young Cabot Cove singer Cyndi Gabriel is sent on scholarship to Nashville, everyone is stunned when she's charged with the murder of a brash music publisher. Now it's up to Jessica to uncover the truth, or poor Cyndi will never get the chance for an encore.

Discover the darker side of the Garden State with this anthology of gritty mystery stories. Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each volume is compromised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the geographical area of the book. In New Jersey Noir, a star-studded cast of authors sifts through the hidden dirt of the Garden State. Featuring brand-new stories (and a few poems) by Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Safran Foer, Robert Pinsky, Edmund White & Michael Carroll, Richard Burgin, Pulitzer Prize–winner Paul Muldoon, Sheila Kohler, C.K. Williams, Gerald Stern, Lou Manfredo, S.A. Solomon, Bradford Morrow, Jonathan Santlofer, Jeffrey Ford, S.J. Rozan, Barry N. Malzberg & Bill Pronzini, Hirsh Sawhney, and Robert Arellano. Praise for New Jersey Noir “Oates’s introduction to Akashic’s noir volume dedicated to the Garden State, with its evocative definition of the genre, is alone worth the price of the book . . . Highlights include Lou Manfredo’s “Soul Anatomy,” in which a politically connected rookie cop is involved in a fatal shooting in Camden; S.J. Rozan’s “New Day Newark,” in which an elderly woman takes a stand against two drug-dealing gangs; and Jonathan Santlofer’s “Lola,” in which a struggling Hoboken artist finds his muse . . . . Poems by C.K. Williams, Paul Muldoon, and others—plus photos by Gerald Slota—enhance this distinguished entry.” —Publishers Weekly “It was inevitable that this fine noir series would reach New Jersey. It took longer than some readers might have wanted, but, oh boy, was it worth the wait . . . More than most of the entries in the series, this volume is about mood and atmosphere more than it is about plot and character . . . It should go without saying that regular readers of the noir series will seek this one out, but beyond that, the book also serves as a very good introduction to what is a popular but often misunderstood term and style of writing.” —Booklist, Starred Review “A lovingly collected assortment of tales and poems that range from the disturbing to the darkly humorous.” —Shelf Awareness

Enter the dark welter of troubled history throughout the Americas, where a heritage of violence meets the ferocity of intent. This sharp, stylised and ambitious anthology of Native American literature sees authors of Indian heritage or blood join non-Indian authors in creating these diverse, gripping, dubious and sleazy stories. Includes contributions from award-winning author Reed Farrel Coleman and Lawrence Block, author of Hit and Run (Orion, 2009).

The pioneering, incisive, lavishly illustrated survey of noir on television—the first of its kind Noir—as a style, movement, or sensibility—has its roots in hardboiled detective fiction by writers like Chandler and Hammett, and films adapted from their novels were among the first called “film noir” by French cineÌ?astes. But film isn’t the only medium with a taste for a dark story. Hundreds of noir dramas have been produced for television, featuring detectives and femmes fatales, gangsters, and dark deeds, continuing week after week, with a new disruption of the social order. In TV Noir, television historian Allen Glover presents the first complete study of the subject. Deconstructing its key elements with astute analysis, from NBC’s adaptation of Woolrich’s The Black Angel to the anthology programs of the ’40s and ’50s, from the classic period of Dragnet, M Squad, and 77 Sunset Strip to neo-noirs of the ’60s and ’70s including The Fugitive, Kolchak, and Harry O., this is the essential volume on TV noir.

Malice and mayhem simmer beneath the surface of one of America's favorite vacation areas. “Youthful alienation and despair dominate the 13 stories in Akashic’s noir volume devoted to Cape Cod. [It] will satisfy those with a hankering for a taste of the dark side.” —Publishers Weekly “David L. Ulin has put together a malicious collection of short stories that will stay with you long after you return home safe.” —The Cult: The Official Chuck Palahniuk Website Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand-new stories by: William Hastings, Elyssa East, Dana Cameron, Paul Tremblay, Adam Mansbach, Seth Greenland, Lizzie Skurnick, David L. Ulin, Kaylie Jones, Fred G. Leebron, Ben Greenman, Dave Zeltserman, and Jedediah Berry. From the introduction by David L. Ulin: “Here, we see the inverse of the Cape Cod stereotype, with its sailboats and its presidents. Here, we see the flip side of the Kennedys, of all those preppies in docksiders eating steamers, of the whale watchers and bicycles and kites. Here, we see the Cape beneath the surface, the Cape after the summer people have gone home. It doesn’t make the other Cape any less real, but it does suggest a symbiosis, in which our sense of the place can’t help but become more complicated, less about vacation living than something more nuanced and profound . . . "For me, Cape Cod is a repository of memory: forty summers in the same house will do that to you. But it is also a landscape of hidden tensions, which rise up when we least anticipate. In part, this has to do with social aspiration, which is one of the things that brought my family, like many others, to the Cape. In part, it has to do with social division, which has been a factor since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when then summer trade began. There are lines here, lines that get crossed and lines that never get crossed, the kinds of lines that form the web of noir. Call it what you want—summer and smoke is how I think of it—but that’s the Cape Cod at the center of this book.“