A struggling screenwriter inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld after his oddball friends kidnap a gangster's beloved Shih Tzu.

A police shootout leaves four thieves dead during an explosive armed robbery attempt in Chicago. Their widows have nothing in common except a debt left behind by their spouses' criminal activities. Hoping to forge a future on their own terms, they join forces to pull off a heist.

From award-winning writer Steven Carroll comes the first book in a series of post-war literary crime novels featuring Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter.
Cambridge, UK, 1947. Martin Friedrich, a German philosopher, is cycling through an intersection on his way to give a lecture when a speeding car strikes and kills him. Shortly afterwards, Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, an Austrian-born cockney Jew, whose parents were interned during the war as enemy aliens, stands over the body of Friedrich, contemplating the age-old question – who did it? Friedrich might be one of the finest minds of his age, but he's problematic: arrogant and a womaniser, he was also, in the 1930s, a member of the Nazi Party. As Stephen is soon to discover, there is no shortage of suspects. Friedrich was hated by almost everybody, even those who loved him. Is there any sense to his death or was it just a case of rotten, random luck? Has the universe spoken? Or are there more sinister factors at work?From one of Australia's finest, most critically acclaimed writers, Death of a Foreign Gentleman is a playful, poignant and absorbing literary crime novel, with shades of The Third Man and Brighton Rock, which examines the question of how to live a meaningful life in an indifferent, random, post-God world.'A novel of remarkable poise, which marries its weighty concerns and deeply felt sensibility to a playful delight in the very real pleasures of the genre it so deftly inhabits.' The Age

After losing an election to become chairman of the Wo Lin Shing triad, a gang leader lashes out and tries to seize the dragon-head baton, the official symbol of a chairman's authority.