Hard Crime

Caught in a snowstorm of drugs, passion, and hate, Spenser investigates a cocaine-related murder.

Once again, Kinsey Millhone, America's favorite female P.I., embroils herself in a complex and entertaining Alphabet Murder Mystery. When Wendell Jaffe, mastermind of a real-estate scam, disappeared at sea, no body was found. Now, five years later, he's declared legally dead, and California Fidelity has to pay up on his life insurance policy to the tune of half-a-million dollars. Soon after, the tune slides off-key when Jaffe is spotted in Mexico and Fidelity hires Kinsey Millhone to sort things out.

Stark Justice follows the adventures of a retired police detective who travels around the country in an RV - looking for trouble that often finds him first. Like a lot of men in his profession, he had a well-developed plan for his retirement. The RV was always part of it, his wife was the one who suggested it and she helped pick out the model down to the upholstery. But she died before he put his papers in; his only consolation was they had taken a weekend trip in the camper before she passed. She knew him, and made him swear he would not sell it, that he would go and live the life he ...

W.E.B. Griffin's best-selling series, The Corps and Brotherhood of War, have captured the pride and glory of the military community. Now he reveals a city police force with the same unique blend of realism, drama, and action. Here are the brave men and women behind the badge as you've never seen them before - their hopes and fears, their courage and heroism, sparked by a single, shocking event: The killing of a cop in the line of duty.

George V. Higgins's seminal crime novel is a down-and-dirty tale of thieves, mobsters, and cops on the mean streets of Boston. When small-time gunrunner Eddie Coyle is convicted on a felony, he's looking at three years in the pen—that is, unless he sells out one of his big-fish clients to the DA. But which of the many hoods, gunmen, and executioners whom he calls his friends should he send up the river? Told almost entirely in crackling dialogue by a vivid cast of lowlifes and detectives, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is one of the greatest crime novels ever written.

Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski knows from the start that Consuelo Alvarado's baby is trouble. Consuelo is 16. Diabetic. And the daughter of a friend. When she goes into labor too early, even V. I.'s wild drive to get her to the hospital can't save either Consuelo or her child.

Spenser's girlfriend Susan goes away with another man, Jerry Costigan, the son of a very rich and dangerous criminal. Spenser and his friend, Hawk, go to find Susan. Soon they are in the world of the CIA, guns and murder.

To the police, Shashank Yadav was a ruthless killer, accused of multiple murders—a dangerous criminal who belonged behind the iron bars of a prison cell. The evidence against him was ironclad, and his chances of walking free were virtually nonexistent. Yet despite everything, Shashank maintained his innocence, claiming he was nothing but a pawn in a sinister conspiracy determined to destroy him.

After a highly decorated police officer is found brutally murdered in the ski resort town of High Peaks, the State Bureau of Criminal Investigation steps in. Upon hearing the news, homicide investigator Noah Sutherland returns to his hometown in the Adirondacks, believing his brother's death to be more than just a cold, methodical ambush.

The adoring wife of a senatorial candidate has a smile as sweet as candy and dots her "i's" with little hearts. A blond beauty, she is the perfect mate for an ambitious politician, but she has a little problem with sex and drugs--a problem someone has managed to put on videotape. The big boys figure a little blackmail will put her husband out of the race. Until Spenser hops on the candidate's bandwagon.

What drives someone to murder? Logan McRae's personal history is hardly squeaky clean, but now that he works for Professional Standards he's policing his fellow officers. When Detective Inspector Bell turns up dead in the drivers seat of a crashed car, it's a shock to everyone. Because Bell died two years ago. They buried him. Or they thought they did. As an investigation is launched into Bell's stabbing, Logan digs into his past. Where has he been all this time? Why did he disappear? And what's so important that he felt the need to come back from the dead?

On January 15, 1947, the tortured body of a beautiful young woman was found in a vacant lot in Hollywood. Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, a young Hollywood hopeful, had been brutally murdered. Her murder sparked one of the greatest manhunts in California history.

Meet Jessica Jones: retired superhero, private investigator, loner. She tried her best to be a shiny spandex crimefighter, but that life only led to unspeakable trauma. Now she avoids that world altogether and works on surviving day-to-day in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. The morning a distraught mother comes into her office, Jessica would prefer to nurse her hangover and try to forget last night’s poor choices. But something about Amber Randall’s story strikes a chord with her. Amber is adamant that something happened to her teenage twins while they were visiting their father in the UK.

"A potent, briskly-paced crime thriller featuring a detective whose vulnerability creates first-class suspense." –Best Thrillers Chantal Pouliot, of the Quebec police force, is relegated to mind-numbing desk duty because of a case that went wrong six months earlier. A break comes her way in the form of a white-collar cyber-crime case, something she hopes will help restore her status as an undercover detective. The downside is having to collaborate with an RCMP team that will join her in Quebec City. When the safe, tedious job she envisaged turns to murder with a potential link to ...

Detective Sebastian Clifford and his partner Lucinda "Birdie" Bird are about to embark on their most challenging case yet when Lady Angelica Charing tasks them with finding the son she secretly gave away when she was only sixteen. Time's running out. This long-lost son isn't just a missing puzzle piece; he's the last hope for a life-saving kidney transplant for his dying half-brother. The stakes couldn't be higher.

When McGee picks up the phone and hears a voice from the past, he can't help it. He has to meddle. Especially when he has the chance to reunite Sam Taggart, a reckless, restless man like himself, with the woman who's still waiting for him. But what begins as a simple matchmaking scheme soon becomes a bloody chase that takes McGee to Mexico, a beautiful country - and one from which he hopes to return alive.

Containing over 47 stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train - a bullet couldn't pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes.

Detective Michael Bennett and his family are about to be haunted by a father's worst nightmare - the signs he should have seen and a son's desperate cry for help. Reeling from a crisis that would destroy lesser families, the Bennetts escape New York for a much-needed vacation. An idyllic country town in the Maine woods is haunted by an epidemic emptying its streets and preying on its youth. Turns out the vacation brochures don't tell the full story - the seemingly perfect community has a deadly vice.

In the wake of a huge storm, three bodies are discovered in the rubble of an abandoned factory building in an industrial part of Paradise known as The Swap. One body, a man's, wrapped in a blue tarp, is only hours old. But found within feet of that body are the skeletal remains of two teenage girls who had gone missing during a Fourth of July celebration 25 years earlier.

A half-dead brute found with his head smashed in on top of a half-dead hooker. Two bent cops with a terrible secret to hide at any cost. A missing witness with a dark reason for staying missing. Damaged people set on an unswerving collision course with terrible consequences for them all... A twisted, graphic crime novella from the author of BiteMarks and Grind Their Bones.