by Nicola Griffith (2007)
From cult phenomenon to award-winning literary sensation, "the sexiest action figure since James Bond" (Seattle Weekly) returns in an exhilarating new thriller. It doesn't matter how well trained you are, how big, how fast, how strong; there will always be someone out there bigger or faster or stronger. Always. That's what Aud Torvingen teaches the students in her self-defense class. But the question is whether Aud really believes this lesson herself-and if not, what it will take for her to learn it. Aud has trained herself to achieve a fierce, machine-like precision, in hand-to-hand combat as well as life. But in Always she is abruptly confronted with the limits of her own power. Her self-defense classes spin violently out of her grasp and, still reeling from the consequences, she embarks on a seemingly simple investigation of Seattle real estate fraud that pulls her into something far more complicated and dangerous than she had imagined.
Michael Gilbert
The woman was young, French, and on trial for murdering a man said to be her ex-lover and the father of her dead child: an English major who had been one of the great heroes of the French Underground Resistance during the war. Mr. Macrea, hired to be her attorney on the first day of the trial, must find a way to prove her innocence in only one week. And he must dig deeply into the past to prove it.
Kelley Armstrong
Protect the innocent. If there is any one principle that drives hitwoman Nadia Stafford it's this. When she was 13 she failed to protect her older cousin Amy from being raped and murdered. As Wild Justice opens, she fails again, disastrously, when she botches a hit on a man who's been beating his wife. Before she's had a chance to fix things, the wife is murdered and Nadia plunges into despair. To help her find equilibrium again, her mentor, Jack, brings her a gift: the location and new identity of the serial predator who killed her cousin. Vengeance, justice? With the predator in her sights, nothing seems more right, more straightforward, more simple. But fierce as Nadia is, she is shaken to the core by what she discovers about the real events of her past. The wounds inscribed on her soul during the long night when her cousin was killed have shaped her, and justice is wild indeed.
Joan Lexau
When his neighbor finds dog food in strange places all over his house, Willy Nilly asks Miss Happ, a witch, to help solve the mystery.
Ed Kovacs
Investigating the murder of a politically connected New Orleans bar owner in the aftermath of a devastating Category 5 hurricane, former police officer and mixed-martial artist Cliff St. James discovers possible CIA involvement in the crime.