House of Mystery Radio on NBC

Alcoholism is a serious problem, but then again so is murder. A gruff detective investigates foul play in these four one-act thrillers revolving around addiction. These stories take place in seemingly safe settings like a laundry room, a rehab, a hospital, and a dream, all of which become insidious deathtraps.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

LOS ANGELES, 1963: African American Korean War veteran Harry Ingram earns a living as a news photographer and occasional process server: chasing police radio calls and dodging baseball bats. With racial tensions running high on the eve of Martin Luther King’s Freedom Rally, Ingram risks becoming a victim at every crime scene he photographs.When Ingram hears about a deadly automobile accident on his police scanner, he recognizes the vehicle described as belonging to his good friend and old army buddy, a white jazz trumpeter. The LAPD declares the car crash an accident, but when Ingram develops his photos, he sees signs of foul play. Ingram feels compelled to play detective, even if it means putting his own life on the line. Armed with his wits, his camera, and occasionally his Colt .45, “One-Shot” Harry plunges headfirst into the seamy underbelly of LA society, tangling with racists, leftists, gangsters, zealots, and lovers, all in the hope of finding something resembling justice for a friend.Master storyteller and crime fiction legend Gary Phillips has filled the pages of One-Shot Harry with fascinating historical cameos, wise-cracks, tenderness, and an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride of a plot with consequences far beyond one dead body.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Top global technology lawyer Tornait “Torn” Sagara knows he shouldn’t get involved with his beautiful client, Saya Brooks, whose revolutionary lightning-on-demand invention will solve climate change and render all other energy sources obsolete. But their shared connection as hafu (half Japanese, half American) draws them irresistibly together.Saya’s technology could save the world, but what’s good for the planet is bad news for those who profit from the status quo. Now, someone wants to stop Saya from commercializing her invention and will go to any lengths—even murder—to do so. When Torn takes Saya for a spin on his motorcycle, they are viciously attacked. That death-defying battle on a crowded Tokyo expressway is only the start of Torn’s wild ride.As the violence escalates, Torn discovers that everything he values—his reputation, his family, and even his life—is on the line. Racing from the boardrooms of Tokyo to the wilds of Russia in a desperate search for the truth, Torn is forced to face his own flaws and discover what really matters most.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Frank, a frustrated singer-turned-music professor finds himself entangled in a love affair with Shelley, a highly-educated, unhappily married woman.Jonesing to quit his teaching gig, Frank jumps at the chance to implement his new girlfriend's scheme to steal the skimmed-cash treasure from her marijuana business tycoon husband. Feeling they need a third, she introduces him to Ramon, her go-to bartender, armed with a nomadic upbringing and a gun from behind the register, who likewise is all in. But Shelley's well-thought-out heist gets more complicated when the two men find themselves impossibly drawn to one another.Hiding out in Palm Springs—99 miles from L.A.—Frank and Ramon team up in more ways than one, breaking promises not to reunite before Shelley can escape the watchful eye of her husband's colleagues after the brutal crime succeeds. With a trunk full of money and the aphrodisiac of lawlessness urging them on, was lust morphing towards love? Or was there a deeper plan in place between these three desperate partners, each of them scratching at their last chance for freedom from a failing American dream?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Bram Stoker Award® Finalist!The willow is femininity, desire, death. Rebirth. With its ability to grow from a single broken branch, it is the living embodiment of immortality. It is the yin that wards off malevolent spirits. It is both revered and shunned.In Tortured Willows, four Southeast Asian women writers of horror expand on the exploration of otherness begun with the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women.Like the willow, women have bent and bowed under the expectations and duty heaped upon them. Like the willow, they endure and refuse to break.With exquisite poetry, Christina Sng, Angela Yuriko Smith, Lee Murray, and Geneve Flynn invite you to sit beneath the tortured willow’s gravid branches and listen to the uneasy shiver of its leaves.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the town of Marshall sits the Federal courthouse of the Eastern District of Texas, a place revered by patent lawyers for its speedy jury trails and massive punitive payouts. Marshall is flooded with patent lawyers, all of whom find work being the local voice for the big-city legal teams that need to sway a small-town jury. One of the best is James Euchre. Euchre’s new client is Amir Zawar, a firebrand CEO forced to defend his life's work against a software patent infringement. Late one night, after a heated confrontation in a preliminary hearing, Judge Gardner is found murdered in the courthouse parking lot. All signs point to Zawar—he has motive, he has opportunity, and he has no alibi. Moreover, he is an outsider, a wealthy Pakistani-American businessman, the son of immigrants, who stands accused of killing a beloved hometown hero.Zawar claims his innocence, and demands that Euchre defend him. It’s the last thing Euchre wants—Judge Gardner was his good friend and mentor—but the only way he can get definitive answers is to take the case. With the help of a former prosecutor and a local PI, Euchre must navigate the byzantine world of criminal defense law in a town where everyone knows everyone, and bad blood has a long history. The deeper he digs, the more he fears that he’ll either send an innocent man to death row or set a murderer free. The Local is a small-town legal thriller as big in scope as Texas. It crackles with courtroom tension and high stakes gambits on every page to the final, shocking verdictSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1979, the gruesome slaying of a thirteen-year-old boy riveted the suburbs of Suffolk County, New York. As the county hustled to bring the case to a dubious resolution, a wayward local teenager emerged with a convenient story to tell. For his cooperation, Jimmy Burke was rewarded with a job as a cop.Thus began Burke’s unlikely ascent to the top of one of the country’s largest law enforcement jurisdictions. He and a crew of likeminded allies utilized vengeance, gangster tactics, and political leverage to become the most powerful and feared figures in their suburban empire.Until a pilfered bag of sex toys brought it all crashing down.Jimmy the King is the story of the rise, reign, and paranoiac fall of a corrupt cop and his regime—a crime family with badges and guaranteed pensions. Novelistic in detail and piercing in its political insight, this book will leave you questioning who modern policing serves, who it protects, and who it preys upon and abandonsSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

PI Mitch O'Reilly is hired by big time Hollywood director T.J. Mooney to follow his son Austin who is starting an acting career without riding the coattails of his powerful father. T.J. isn't happy his beloved son has changed his last name and chooses to live in a sketchy apartment and not the family mansion in Bel Air.To Mitch it's another routine stakeout until Austin’s body is found on the hill below the Hollywood Sign. Was the body left there to send a message? If so, deciphering that message could lead Mitch to solving the crime.“Brad Shreve serves up a Chandler-esque Los Angeles full of show biz types and perverts, mansions and bad neighborhoods. At the center of it all is Mitch O’Reilly a deeply troubled detective with an attitude who can’t find his way to the quiet life he craves.” - Marshall Thornton, three time Lambda Award winner and author of the Boystown, and Pinx Video series.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The leaders of Tae Kwon Do, an Olympic sport and one of the world’s most popular martial arts, are fond of saying that their art is ancient and filled with old dynasties and superhuman feats. In fact, Tae Kwon Do is as full of lies as it is powerful techniques. Since its rough beginnings in the Korean military 60 years ago, the art empowered individuals and nations, but its leaders too often hid the painful truths that led to that empowerment — the gangsters, secret-service agents, and dictators who encouraged cheating, corruption, and murder. A Killing Art: The Untold History of Tae Kwon Do takes you into the cults, geisha houses, and crime syndicates that made Tae Kwon Do. It shows how, in the end, a few key leaders kept the art clean and turned it into an empowering art for tens of millions of people in more than 150 countries. A Killing Art is part history and part biography — and a wild ride to enlightenment.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

DISASTERAMA: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997, is the true story of Alvin Orloff who, as a shy kid from the suburbs of San Francisco, stumbled into the wild, eclectic crowd of Crazy Club Kids, Punk Rock Nutters, Goofy Goofballs, Fashion Victims, Disco Dollies, Happy Hustlers, and Dizzy Twinks of post-Stonewall American queer culture of the late 1970s, only to see the “subterranean lavender twilit shadow world of the gay ghetto” ravished by AIDS in the 1980s. Includes an introduction by Alexander Chee (How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.In Disasterama, Orloff recalls the delirious adventures of his youth—from San Francisco to Los Angeles to New York—where insane nights, deep friendships with the creatives of the underground, and thrilling bi-coastal living led to a free-spirited life of art, manic performance, high camp antics, and exotic sexual encounters, until AIDS threatened to destroy everything he lived for.In his introduction, award-winning essayist and novelist Alexander Chee notes, "There’s a strange love I have for these times that can be hard to explain. How can I love what I lived through from a time that was as ‘bad’ as that? But as I read this, and those days came into view again, what I think of that love now is that there was a beauty to the beauty you found then that was made the more fierce by the horror of what was happening. If you could still find the worth of your life, still find sex, love, friendship, your own self-worth amid these attempts by the state at erasure and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, then it had the strength of something forged in fire."Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.