Introduction: In the era before he created moody private investigator Matthew Scudder, burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, sleepless spy Evan Tanner, and the amiable hit man Keller&mdashand years before his first Edgar Award&mdasha young writer named Lawrence Block submitted a story titled "You Can't Lose" to Manhunt magazine. It was published, and the rest is history. One Night Stands and Lost Weekends is a sterling collection of short crime fiction and suspense novelettes penned between 1958 and 1962 by aView Details>

Introduction: A beautiful young woman called Marilyn picks up a stranger in a bar and takes him home to her Manhattan apartment. The next morning her housekeeper discovers Marilyn's body. Marilyn's life and death have far-reaching effects on others, even people she has never met: a charismatic former police commissioner on the verge of a breakdown a struggling writer a folk art dealer plumbing the depths of her own fierce sexuality a lawyer who prefers murder trials because there's one witness fewer.View Details>

Introduction: Hit and Run (Keller #4) Keller's a hit man. For years now he's had places to go and people to kill. But enough is enough. He's got money in the bank and just one last job standing between him and retirement. So he carries it out with his usual professionalism, and he heads home, and guess what? One more job. Paid in advance, so what's he going to do? Give the money back?In Des Moines, Keller stalks his designated target and waits for the client to give him the go-ahead. And oneView Details>

Introduction: Hit Man (Keller #1) Keller is an assassin – he is paid by the job and works for a mysterious man who nominates hits and passes on commissions from elsewhere. Keller goes in, does the job, gets out: usually at a few hours’ notice . . . Often Keller’s work takes him out of New York to other cities, to pretty provincial towns that almost tempt him into moving to the woods and the lakeshores. Almost but not quite. But then one job goes wrong in a way Keller has never imagined and it leaves himView Details>

Introduction: Mixing poetry with drugs, sex, and murder would not be the first thing to come to mind if you were thinking about writing crime fiction. And unless you're Victor Gischler, the results of such an abominable coupling would likely be a bad as it sounds. But if Gischler isn't the most talented new crime writer to hit the pages in the last few years, he is certainly the most bizarre. Of his three novels - five stars everyone - "The Pistol Poets" is the most blackly humorous - think a moView Details>

Introduction: Charlie Swift just pumped three .38-caliber bullets into a dead polar bear in his taxidermist girlfriend&rsquos garage. But he&rsquos a gun monkey, and no one can blame him for having an itchy trigger finger. Ever since he drove down the Florida Turnpike with a headless body in the trunk of a Chrysler, then took down four cops, Charlie&rsquos been running hard through the sprawling sleaze of central Florida. And to make matters worse, he&rsquos holding on to some crooked paperwork that a lot of View Details>

Introduction: Real Murders (Aurora Teagarden Mysteries #1) Though a small town at heart, Lawrenceton, Georgia, has its dark side-and crime buffs. One of whom is librarian Aurora "Roe" Teagarden, a member of the Real Murders Club, which meets once a month to analyze famous cases. It's a harmless pastime-until the night she finds a member killed in a manner that eerily resembles the crime the club was about to discuss. And as other brutal "copycat" killings follow, Roe will have to uncoView Details>

Introduction: Ed, an American author on the hunt for a story for his next book, arrives in London looking for inspiration. A stranger in a strange city, he's haunted by a deadly secret that refuses to stay buried, and no matter how hard he tries he cannot escape the manifest sins of his past. What Ed wants is answers, what he finds is something he definitely didn't bargain for: the beautiful and untouchable Andeanna Menderes. Andeanna is a woman who is dangerously bound to one of London's most notoriView Details>

Introduction: The Venetian Betrayal (Cotton Malone #3) Cotton Malone is back and the stakes were never higher: a deadly virus that could wipe out civilisation as we know it - and a cure that lies buried in the past. The Venetian League, a secret group of 45 political and economic leaders from around the world, has joined forces with a coalition of former Soviet republics to create a potentially devastating biological weapon, a bird flu-like virus that has been artificially mutated to pass from human to View Details>

Introduction: The Alexandria Link (Cotton Malone #2) A hidden treasure. A forgotten truth. Cotton Malone is in trouble. His son has been kidnapped and his bookshop in Copenhagen attacked, all because he is the only man alive who knows the whereabouts of the Alexandria link - the means of locating the most important cache of ancient knowledge ever assembled: the legendary Library of Alexandria, which vanished without trace fifteen hundred years ago. Now, Malone is forced to join the search for a forgotteView Details>