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.
Set across California, from San Diego’s underworld to 1970s Los Angeles and present-day LA courts—the city is more than a backdrop; it’s a character. From a crooked kingmaker to a criminal underground figure to a billion-dollar AI industry, 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.
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About the Books
Tear the City Down
Coltrane Davis is at once a knight and a hustler. He has risen to wealth and success, graduating from San Diego’s back alleys to the halls of power through his partnership with Saul Sollman, a crooked kingmaker among the city’s elite.
Running multimillion-dollar scams with Saul, he has been Saul’s fixer, but now he wants out of the hustle so that he can focus on his teenage daughter’s burgeoning tennis career and finally be the dad he has always wanted to be.
But when the Los Angeles Chargers’ star running back vanishes one evening before a big game, Coltrane is drawn into an investigation of what happened by Saul and his protégé, the player’s agent.
The stakes escalate with a gut-punch when the trail leads into San Diego’s underworld of drugs and prostitution and reveals clues to the disappearance of his daughter’s best friend, whose loss has haunted him.
The Proving Ground
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…
Gray Dawn
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.
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
