Hard Crime

When Sam Spade gets drawn into the Maltese Falcon case, we know what to expect: straight talk, hard questions, no favors, and no way for anyone to get underneath the protective shell he wears like a second skin. We know that his late partner, Miles Archer, was a son of a bitch; that Spade is sleeping with Archer's wife, Iva; that his tomboyish secretary, Effie Perine, is the only innocent in his life. What we don't know is how Spade became who he is. Spade & Archer completes the picture.

Paradise, Massachusetts, is preparing for the summer tourist season when a string of car thefts disturbs what is usually a quiet time in town. In a sudden escalation of violence, the thefts become murder, and chief of police Jesse Stone finds himself facing one of the toughest cases of his career. Pressure from the town politicians only increases when another crime wave puts residents on edge. Jesse confronts a personal dilemma as well: a burgeoning relationship with a young PR executive, whose plans to turn Paradise into a summertime concert destination....

Cyrus Shelton has spent the last twenty-three years locked up in the Huntsville State Penitentiary with only one thing on his mind - revenge on the arresting detective, Frank Windom, and his lousy defense attorney, Jonell Simone. Now paroled and having learned Windom had the nerve to die, he sets his sights on Windom's former partner, Jack West.

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.

A murder made to look like suicide. Another that appears an accident. DI Barton investigates the tragedies that have shattered a family’s lives, but without obvious leads, the case goes nowhere. Then, when the remains of a body are found, everything points to one suspect. Barton and his team move quickly, and once the killer is behind bars, they can all breathe a sigh of relief. But death still lurks in the shadows, and no one's soul is safe. Not even those of the Detectives.

When a casino robbery in Atlantic City goes horribly awry, the man who orchestrated it is obliged to call in a favor from someone who's occasionally called Jack. While it's doubtful that anyone knows his actual name or anything at all about his true identity, or even if he's still alive, he's in his mid-30s and lives completely off the grid, a criminal's criminal who does entirely as he pleases and is almost impossible to get in touch with.

Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness. A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett invented the noir crime novel.

The 40-year-old crucifixion of a prominent labor leader named Jack Flynn remains an unsolved atrocity that has never been forgotten in New Iberia, Louisiana. When Flynn's daughter, Megan, returns to the site of her father's murder, it quickly becomes clear that her family's blood-stained past will not stay buried. Megan gives her old friend Dave Robicheaux a tip about a small-time criminal named Cool Breeze Broussard, scarcely suspecting that the seemingly innocuous case will lead Robicheaux and his partner into the midst of a deadly conspiracy.

In this final installment of the widely popular “Animal” series, we find our anti-hero on a hunt for the woman who forced him to pick his guns back up when she burned his entire world down. The traitorous Red Sonja. She alone holds the key to saving his children and avenging his murdered wife, Gucci, but first he has to find her.

Cash and Sheriff Wheaton make for a strange partnership. He pulled her from her mother's wrecked car when she was three. He's kept an eye out for her ever since. It's a tough place to live - northern Minnesota along the Red River. Cash navigated through foster homes, and at 13 was working farms. She's tough as nails, five feet two inches, blue jeans, blue jean jacket, smokes Marlboros, drinks Bud Longnecks. Makes her living driving truck. Playing pool on the side.

Who is NYPD Detective Damien Drake? For starters, he’s an alcoholic with PTSD; a man who doesn’t play well with others and could care less about political correctness. But he’s also the one they call in when the most heinous crimes are committed by the city’s most sadistic murderers. He’s the one they bring in when there are no clues, no evidence, and the killer shows no remorse. He's the one enlisted to keep the streets of New York City safe. Just don’t get on his bad side because he’s also the one detective in New York that you don’t want as an enemy....

Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her - so she can kill him with her bare hands. In this thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegade private eye teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements.

Called upon by The Hammond Museum and renowned art scholar Dr. Ashton Prince, Spenser accepts his latest case: to provide protection during a ransom exchange-money for a stolen painting. The case becomes personal when Spenser fails to protect his client and the valuable painting remains stolen. Convinced that Ashton Prince played a bigger role than just ransom delivery boy, Spenser enters into a daring game of cat-and-mouse with the thieves....

Former Seattle homicide cop J. P. Beaumont faces trouble in the small town of Ashland, as both his personal and professional lives are thrown into turmoil. Beau’s daughter and son-in-law are having marital troubles, and his grandson, a senior in high school, shows up on his doorstep, wanting to live with Beau and his wife Mel as he finishes out the school year. Meanwhile, a friend from his past asks for Beau’s help in looking into what appears to be an accidental death.

Responding to reports of deadly screams in the Ironbridge Gorge, Detective Sergeant Jenna Morgan is first on the scene to investigate. As the search intensifies, Jenna soon discovers her sister Fliss’ severely injured Dalmatian, Domino, and the naked, tortured body of an unknown woman.

On the mend after getting run out of Chicago, professional cardsharp Bill Maynard is hungry for some action...but not nearly as hungry as Joyce Rogers, the tantalizing wife of Bill's latest mark. Together they hatch an ingenious scheme to get rid of her husband. But in life as in poker, the other player sometimes has an ace up his sleeve.

Commissario Guido Brunetti comes to the aid of a young nursing sister who has had five patients unexpectedly die and decides to leave her convent. In the course of his inquiries, Brunetti encounters an unusual cast of characters but discovers nothing that seems criminal. Is the nun simply creating a smoke screen to justify abandoning her vocation? Or has she stumbled onto something very real and very sinister - something that places her own life in imminent danger?

Irish Garda detective Mick Boyle is back in the most challenging manhunt he has ever had to face. Young girls are vanishing off the streets in a trail that leads from Downpatrick in Northern Ireland to Boyle’s doorstep in Castlebar, County Mayo. The mystery killer has evaded capture in a spree that stretches back 10 years – and there is no sign that he intends to stop. He never leaves clues. He doesn’t offer up bodies. He simply picks off his victims one by one before moving on to the next target. But Boyle is determined to catch him – no matter what it takes. The kidnapper is ...

Spenser is good at finding things. But this time he has a client out on Cape Cod who is in over his head. Harvey Shepard has lost his pretty wife - and a very pretty quarter million bucks in real estate. Now a loan shark is putting on the bite.

Brunetti is forced to confront the price of loyalty, to his past and in his work, as a seemingly innocent request leads him into troubling waters. What role can or should loyalty play in the life of a police inspector? It’s a question Commissario Guido Brunetti must face and ultimately answer in Give Unto Others, Donna Leon’s splendid 31st installment of her acclaimed Venetian crime series.