[CLOSED] Navigate the Criminal Underworld: A Stack of Hard-Hitting Cases Awaits!

Enter for a chance to win three hard-boiled detective thrillers. 

Book covers of hardboiled detective thrillers giveaway.
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Corrupt backdrops, raw realism, and scrappy protagonists: this giveaway has everything you’re looking for in your next crime read. Ten lucky winners will have a chance to take home this prize pack provided by Hachette Book Group—following three detectives who thought they’d left past danger behind.

From 1970s Los Angeles and present-day LA courts to scenic Northern Ireland, each detective is outmatched on paper but must somehow outmaneuver forces bigger than themselves. Could the stakes get any bigger?

Hachette Book Group is one of the largest trade publishers in the United States, home to imprints publishing everything from literary fiction to genre favorites like these. Learn more about this hardboiled detective thriller prize pack below.

This giveaway is open from September 18 through midnight on October 6, 2026.

By submitting your email address, you agree to receive emails from Murder & Mayhem and Hachette Publishing Group.

About the Books

Gray Dawn

Gray Dawn

By Walter Mosley

The name Easy Rawlins stirs excitement in the hearts of readers and fear in the hearts of his foes. 

His success has bought him a thriving detective agency, its first female detective; a remote home, shared with children, pets, and lovers, high atop the hills overlooking gritty Los Angeles; and more trouble, more problems, and more threats to those he loves. In other words, he’s still beset on all sides.
 
A number of below-the-law powerbrokers plead with Easy to find a mysterious, dangerous woman—Lutisha James, though she goes by another name that Easy will immediately recognize. 

1970s Los Angeles is a transient city of delicate, violent balances, and Lutisha has disturbed that. She also has a secret that will upend Easy’s own life, painfully close to home.

In This Bright Future

In This Bright Future

By Peter Grainger

DC Smith must confront both a violent history and the ghosts of his own past in this twisty thriller.

“The greatest fictional sleuth you've probably never heard of." —Financial Teams

Recovering from knee surgery, DC Smith is prescribed two weeks of bed rest. There will be no chasing murderers through the streets of Kings Lane—just a simple cuppa and a good book. He’s almost looking forward to it. That is, until there is a knock at the door.

It’s only his next-door neighbor, but it is the beginning of a thrilling case that will take Smith to Northern Ireland, and three decades back in time to the darkest scenes of the detective’s past as a British intelligence officer during the Troubles.

When old loyalties, buried secrets, and a complicated web of history and betrayal resurface, Smith is forced to confront events he thought were long behind him, because this case is personal.

The Proving Ground

The Proving Ground

By Michael Connelly

Mickey Haller, aka The Lincoln Lawyer, leaves criminal court behind for his first civil lawsuit. But to him, this is still a murder trial.

An AI company’s chatbot encouraged a sixteen-year-old boy to kill his ex-girlfriend. Can Haller prove the company knew the dangers of what it created?

To do so, he turns to Jack McEvoy, a journalist who knows how powerful the coming wave will be, and together they soon uncover a whistleblower in hiding.

As the tech titans try to buy or bully their way out, the scale of their courtroom battle before them becomes clear. Because billions are at stake—along with countless lives—in an all-or-nothing case that could change everything…

For full details, see official rules.

Note: The sweepstakes is open to all legal residents of the 50 United States and Washington, DC who are 18 years of age and older by September 14, 2026. 

Featured image: Hachette Book Group