Showing titles in Dark Humour

It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? Our narrator has many of the advantages of life: young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend.

Patrick Bateman is 26 and works on Wall Street. He is handsome, sophisticated, charming, and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. And he is taking us to a head-on collision with America's greatest dream - and its worst nightmare...

Kyle Hammond is suffering a surprise birthday party he really didn’t want. As he blows out the candles on his cake, he makes a token wish. Three days later, to his utter astonishment, that wish comes true. All his problems solved, Kyle is counting his blessings when a pensioner turns up at his door unannounced. The stranger then confounds Kyle by claiming credit for his good fortune, followed by a bizarre declaration: When Edmund Wishkin grants a wish, there’s always a price to pay. Whether he believes the old man or not, Kyle is about to discover the true cost of a wish fulfilled.

By his own admission, Dougie Neil is a deeply unattractive man. With only one failed relationship to his name, Dougie is now middle-aged, single, and close to giving up his quest to find love. Then, after the strangest of incidents at work, the unthinkable happens—Dougie is propositioned by a succession of attractive women. Armed with his newfound superpower, Dougie’s only remaining challenge is to decide which of his many admirers is Ms. Right. Then he can settle down, get married, and live happily ever after.

It’s almost Christmas and Bunny McGarry is not in the festive spirit. His mood is not improved when an old friend becomes the victim of a violent assault and, for reasons he can’t understand, the police force he is a member of has decided not to investigate. Getting to the bottom of the case ends up putting him on the wrong side of some powerful people.

It’s the year 2000 in Dublin and, following some traumatic events, Detective Bunny McGarry is taking a well-earned break from the force. Bunny’s former partner died in the line of duty under dubious circumstances, but his murky background has suddenly resurfaced, threatening Bunny’s reputation as well. As if that isn’t enough, a young boy is in danger and a woman from the big fella’s past is trapped in a loveless marriage to a monster. They both need Bunny’s help, but he must get to work fast - it seems someone is trying to frame him for murder.

There are angels, and they are not beneficent or loving. But they do watch over us. They watch our lives unfold, analyzing us for repeating patterns and redundancies. When they find them, the angels simplify those patterns and remove the redundancies, and the problem that is "you" gets solved.

At his mother’s family house in the south of France, Patrick Melrose has the run of a magical garden. Bravely imaginative and self-sufficient, five-year-old Patrick encounters the volatile lives of adults with care. His father, David, rules with considered cruelty, and Eleanor, his mother, has retreated into drink. They are expecting guests for dinner. But this afternoon is unlike the chain of summer days before, and the shocking events that precede the guests’ arrival tear Patrick's world in two.

Tender Branson - last surviving member of the so-called "Creedish Death Cult" - is dictating his incredible life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the plane, which will shortly reach terminal velocity and crash into the vast Australian outback.

When Robert (or Kidder, as his best friend calls him) decides to impress at a job interview by making up a son, he discovers that maintaining the lie is far harder than he thought - so he invents a story that 'Brodie' has been kidnapped. After all, it's not like they're going to find the fake boy. But a few weeks later, Kidder receives a call to collect his nonexistent son from the police station, a boy who looks exactly like the picture he photoshopped....

Oh, what fun it is to die! When Austin’s parents drag him and his little sister Fiona to a remote cottage for Christmas, he’s less than thrilled about the forced bonding exercise. But after learning that their holiday getaway was the site of a horrific crime, this family on the rocks will have to fight for their lives against a legendary killer because Candy Cain is slashing through the snow with a very long naughty list.

This is a satellite-dish-free zone of tall houses, standing shoulder to shoulder with big front doors, five floors apiece. You could almost be in Kensington. This is where the actors, writers and media types live, where small children wearing smart uniforms and shoes in the shape of lightbulbs get ferried every day to schools that are not local. Some people are luckier than others; fortune smiles on some and gobs on the rest. Jo Metcalf smokes and spies on the smug Cunninghams down the street as they play their bile-inducing game of happy families.

Ted Wallace is an old, sour, womanising, cantankerous, whisky-sodden beast of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too. Fired from his newspaper, months behind on his alimony payments and disgusted with a world that undervalues him, Ted seeks a few months repose and free drink at Swafford Hall, the country mansion of his old friend Lord Logan. But strange things have been going on at Swafford....

When three-year-old Harry goes missing, the whole of America turns its attention to one small town. Everyone is eager to help. Everyone is a suspect. Desperate mother Jess' grief is driving her to extreme measures. Newcomer Jared, with an easy charm and a string of broken hearts in his wake is also a suspect. Photographer Jerry is a suspect who is determined to break away from his controlling mother once and for all. And investigating them all is a police chief with a hidden obsession of his own....

Many view "hitting rock bottom" as a foundation on which to rebuild one's life, a place from which one can only ascend. Gamers know to search for a secret door leading down to the sewer.

Rocked by a terrible accident, homeless Kelly needs to escape the cold streets of Glasgow. Maybe she doesn’t believe in serendipity, but a rare moment of kindness and a lost ring conspire to call her home. As Kelly vows to reunite the ring with its owner, she must return to the small town she fled so many years ago. On her journey from Glasgow to the south-west tip of Scotland, Kelly encounters ancient pilgrim routes, hostile humans, hippies, book lovers and a friendly dog.

In the aftermath of a family tragedy, an aspiring author is torn between love for her childhood friend and the temptation of a mysterious outsider. Trying to escape the ghosts of her past, she is swept away to a house that breathes, bleeds...and remembers.

Inside every hospital exists a world no outsider is allowed to see: a storm of malpractice, corruption, sex, drink and drop-dead exhaustion. But for first day junior doctors, their initiation into this world - the 'Killing Season' - is about to begin. A whistle-blowing despatch from the frontlines of hospital life, Jed Mercurio's Bodies takes us on a nerve-jangling journey through one junior doctor's loss of innocence and his desperate, dangerous attempts to right his - and his colleagues' - wrongs.

When someone hacks into the systems of eight self-driving cars, their passengers are set on a fatal collision course. The passengers are: a TV star, a pregnant young woman, a disabled war hero, an abused wife fleeing her husband, an illegal immigrant, a husband and wife - and parents of two - who are travelling in separate vehicles and a suicidal man. Now the public have to judge who should survive but are the passengers all that they first seem?

Going back home was not exactly what Tim and the C&C gang expected. Trouble continues to follow them back to Gulf Coast Mississippi. Trouble...and a gnome...and an undead midget.

A Crafty Cigarette is the powerful story of a teenager coming of age in the '70s as seen through his eyes; who, on the cusp of adulthood, discovers a band that is new to him, which leads him into becoming a Mod.

H.H. Munro (Saki) is one of the undisputed masters of the short story. In this complete compendium, the full gamut of his subjects and themes is experienced. His stories are imbued with humorous satire, biting irony, and often the macabre, all of which have one target: the stupidities and hypocrisies of Edwardian upper-class society.

One ordinary morning, Laurie's husband, Mark, vanishes, leaving behind his phone and wallet. For weeks, she tells no one, carrying on her job as a cleaner at the local university, visiting her tricky, dementia-suffering father and holing up in her tower-block flat with a bottle to hand. When she finally reports Mark as missing, the police are suspicious. Why did she take so long? Wasn't she worried? It turns out there are many more mysteries in Laurie's account of events, though not just because she glosses over the facts.

From the rubble-strewn streets of US-occupied Baghdad, the scavenger Hadi collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognise the parts as people and give them a proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realises he has created a monster: one that needs human flesh to survive - first from the guilty, and then from anyone who crosses its path.

It all starts with a girl.... (Because yes, there's always a girl.) Jason Priestley (not that one) has just seen her. They shared an incredible, brief, fleeting moment of deep possibility, somewhere halfway down Charlotte Street. And then, just like that, she was gone - accidentally leaving him holding her old-fashioned, disposable camera, chock-full of undeveloped photos.... And now Jason - ex-teacher, ex-boyfriend, part-time writer and reluctant hero - faces a dilemma: Should he try and track The Girl down? What if she's The One?

The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a mari­juana overdose - and the next thing she knows, she’s in Hell.

The sequel to Jonas Jonasson’s international best seller The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. It all begins with a hot air balloon trip and three bottles of champagne. Allan and Julius are ready for some spectacular views, but they’re not expecting to land in the sea and be rescued by a North Korean ship, and they could never have imagined that the captain of the ship would be harbouring a suitcase full of contraband uranium on a nuclear weapons mission for Kim Jong-un....

Dorothy Graham is dead, which is inconvenient, not least for her. Luckily, she has planned for this eventuality. Now, if any of the truly dreadful people she is related to want to get their hands on her money, they’re going to have to do so via a fiendish difficult and frankly bizarre competition of Dorothy’s devising. After all, just because you’re dead, it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a last laugh at the expense of people who made your life miserable.

Schwere Zeiten für den Eberhofer Franz: Seine Cholesterinwerte sind so hoch wie seine Laune im Keller ist. Statt Schlemmerorgien bei der Oma gibt's nur noch Kaninchenfutter auf dem Teller. Obendrein stresst die Susi mit knallhart durchorganisierten Besuchszeiten für Franz Junior. Und als wäre das alles noch nicht genug, steht der Franz ausgerechnet jetzt vor dem schwierigsten Fall seiner Ermittlerkarriere: ein Toter im Fremdenzimmer bei der Mooshammer Liesl, mit Brandpaste beschmiert und bis zur Unkenntlichkeit verstümmelt. Alles deutet darauf hin, dass der Mörder aus Niederkaltenkirchen stammt.