Annotation:A hardboiled pulp story of murderous mugs that get on the wrong side of a surgeon who’s also a trained assassin. Don’t be surprised if you see this book performing community service dressed in dayglo orange.

Annotation:Chumps don’t have much worse luck than Jack. At an airport bar on his way to his divorce proceedings, he starts flirting with ‘the blonde’. Next thing he knows, he’s been poisoned and trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Breakneck pacing.

Annotation:Nate and Sara are broke so finding a large amount of money seems like a stroke of good fortune until it takes them careening on a collision course where the dangers and hazards never let up. Astonishingly, all the action takes place in the confines of a snowbound motel.

Annotation:A man’s wife and son taken hostage during a bank heist are summarily executed. Obsession and madness follow as the increasingly misanthropic husband and father seeks revenge. This terse, elegant and subtle Roman Noir will have you contemplating the choices you might make given similar circumstances.

Annotation:The plot skilfully weaves past and present in this impressive debut with an inspired noir set-up. Roy Cady’s a hard man with terminal cancer being pursued across a scorched dry Texas. Nothing relieves the spreading physical and urban decay. There’s little redemption for even the best.

Annotation:Is there honour among thieves? Plans go disastrously for Charlie, a crooked lawyer, when he tries to get out of blizzard-engulfed Wichita with his mob boss’s ill-gotten goods on Christmas Eve. Richly atmospheric.

Annotation:Amnesiac hood, Two Gun Danny Layton, makes his way through the shadowed and violent terrain of 1930’s Hollywood. Epperson masterfully manages a noir laced with some touchingly sad love. Ridley Scott is working with Casey Affleck in the film adaptation.

Annotation:A medical doctor attempts to prove an innocent man has been executed and immediately descends into a midnight world of drugs, jagged sex and violence in this pithy, unremittingly bleak noir.

Annotation:The author, Johnny Depp’s half brother, knows well that beneath the Hollywood tinsel, there’s more tinsel and sidewalks of sticky pitch upon which walk some very wretched miscreants doing rather unsavoury things to each other.

Annotation:If you like Jim Thompson’s novels, you’ll enjoy this classic noir. Drifter and criminal, Willa Ree, rolls into a Texas hamlet intent on pillaging it. A crooked town councillor makes Willa his puppet Chief of Police but quickly discovers just how disastrous an idea that was.

Annotation:Sailor, a cool Chicagoan hood, tracks down his sleazy politician boss, Sen, in a small Mexican desert town for a violent shakedown. Trailing both is Chicago cop, Mac. Contains a simple and stunning concluding sentence that might be said to capture all noir protagonists.

Annotation:This is riveting Black Watch tartan-noir soaked in the gore of beatings and set in a very gloomy Edinburgh littered with hard, punched-up men, all hammered into a lunacy of droll characters and action.

Annotation:Jimmy Boone has served time as a Marine and prison inmate. Now he’s out to find who freed the dogs that mauled and killed a Guatemalan refugee. The investigation leads to very sordid dealings in the desert near LA. An impressive debut.