It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — 1874 — and Gabe Beauchamps, the toughest Hell’s Kitchen thug Boss Twill ever threw out of New York, arrived in San Francisco with a great idea: to rob the mint with a little help from some very unusual local talent:

Vangie. A delicate slip of a girl, the West’s loveliest and daintiest and deftest and most pessimistic pickpocket.

Ittzy. San Francisco’s one-man spectator sport. The world’s clumsiest and luckiest escape artist.

Francis (with an “i”). The fey dandy who designs cancan costumes and choreographs the entire San Francisco Fire Department into a lunatic frenzy.

Flagway. The captain of the good ship San Andreas: the ancient mariner two has spent twenty drunken years at sea trying to find his way to a drugstore in Baltimore, Md.

And Percival and Roscoe and Crung and the red-haired policeman who just may have been Mack Sennett’s grandpop—

All mixed together and running like mad in the world’s first comedy romance suspense pirate western adventure novel—

GANGWAY!

Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner is the story of Harry Künt, a practical joker who winds up in the state prison when one of his hoaxes accidentally injures two Congressmen.

In the jail he meets seven tough cons with their own private tunnel into the prison town, making them the world’s first prisoner commuters.

Humans is a jumbo-sized fantasy thriller featuring angels, demons, all-too-human humans, and nothing less than the complete destruction of planet Earth!

The world stinks. God is fed up. He’s ready to take action.

One of His very best Angels has been given the contract. He’s sent to round up a disparate crew of human beings from every corner of the world — a Soviet joke-writer, a Kenyan prostitute, a Brazilian ex-superstar chanteuse, a Chinese student-dissident, and a career criminal from Omaha, among them — gently manipulate them into a rendezvous, and set the wheels rolling for them to bring about the End of the World as We Know It.

Not an easy job, but you don’t get to be an Angel without learning a few dirty tricks.

But — there’s Somebody who happens to like what the human race has been doing with the planet. And soon our Angel finds himself challenged by a very wily Demon — dispatched by the Arch-fiend himself — whose mission is to save the world.

Deciding whom to root for is only one of the pleasures afforded by Donald E. Westlake’s brilliant new novel.

Levine is an episodic saga, a series of six novellas (including one written expressly for this volume) laying open for examination the life of a Brooklyn cop, a man dedicated to his job and living in constant fear of the moment when his ailing heart will finally stop.

Each of the stories is a gem of police procedure and pits Levine against the full assortment of activities which makes up a policeman’s lot — from talking a jumper off a ledge to dealing with a child who believes her mother to be a murderer to facing a Mob gunman on a deserted spit of land. With every step Levine takes, with every confrontation, he listens to the sound of his own heart — to judge his actions as well as to record the missing beats, waiting for the one he won’t hear.

A dump truck and a boy are a perfect combination. All they need is a bit of dirt.

But where do you find dirt if you live in an apartment seven floors above the ground? That is Philip’s problem — a problem he shares with thousands of boys.

Philip does think of some ingenious ways of getting dirt, but he meets with adult disapproval at every turn. The unique and happy solution to his problem finally comes from Mr. Neep, the doorman.

Mr. Neep’s solution is as clever and delightful as the whole story of Philip and his truck. Colorful illustrations by Arnold Dobrin show exactly how the city looks to a small boy who lives in it.

In this volume, guest editor Sue Grafton and series editor Otto Penzler offer up their choices for the best suspense, crime, and mystery stories of the year. Included in these thrilling tales is Scott Bartels’s dark and violent “Swear Not by the Moon,” in which a drug-addicted Creole is caught between good intentions and bad decisions. In Janice Law’s haunting “Secrets,” an Irish immigrant mother and daughter are faced with unexpected cruelties as they try to make a new life for themselves. And in Lawrence Block’s clever Edgar Award-winning story “Keller on the Spot,” a contract killer uncharacteristically saves a life and finds his assignment becoming increasingly complicated.

The diverse styles and themes employed in this collection showcase an impressive array of talent certain to further the popularity of the genre. Already a bestseller in its first year, The Best American Mystery Stories, as evidenced by this year’s edition, promises to keep readers intrigued and coming back for more.

Have yourself a crooked little Christmas with The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries.

Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler collects sixty of his all-time favorite holiday crime stories — many of which are difficult or nearly impossible to find anywhere else. From classic Victorian tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy, to contemporary stories by Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain, this collection touches on all aspects of the holiday season, and all types of mysteries. They are suspenseful, funny, frightening, and poignant.

Included are puzzles by Mary Higgins Clark, Isaac Asimov, and Ngaio Marsh; uncanny tales in the tradition of A Christmas Carol by Peter Lovesey and Max Allan Collins; O. Henry-like stories by Stanley Ellin and Joseph Shearing, stories by pulp icons John D. MacDonald and Damon Runyon; comic gems from Donald E. Westlake and John Mortimer; and many, many more. Almost any kind of mystery you’re in the mood for — suspense, pure detection, humor, cozy, private eye, or police procedural — can be found in these pages.

FEATURING:

— Unscrupulous Santas

— Crimes of Christmases Past and Present

— Festive felonies

— Deadly puddings

— Misdemeanors under the mistletoe

— Christmas cases for classic characters including Sherlock Holmes, Brother Cadfael, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Rumpole of the Bailey, Inspector Morse, Inspector Ghote, A.J. Raffles, and Nero Wolfe.

There’s no doubt that Charlie Poole was a completely innocuous, lazy, ambitionless young man until the night two of his uncle’s friends came to murder him.

Charlie tended bar in his uncle’s Brooklyn saloon and was perfectly happy to do so. There weren’t many customers, but his uncle didn’t seem to care. Uncle, as a matter of fact, had very good connections with the Syndicate, so Charlie passed messages and mysterious packages about whose contents he never asked questions. He simply didn’t care. He lived above the saloon in a small apartment and read most of the day. Nothing uplifting, mind you, just time-killing. This, then, was his happy life until it was rudely interrupted the night that two of the Syndicate’s enforcers came to enforce him out of the world.

Charlie simply wouldn’t believe it at first; some mistake had been made. He had done nothing. He never had done anything. He would get to his uncle in Manhattan and find him and clear the whole thing up. His uncle would call somebody, and the two thugs downstairs would be redirected. Charlie suddenly realized that the two thugs were no longer downstairs. They were definitely clumping their way upstairs to the apartment where Charlie had run when he realized they actually meant to kill him. He then did probably the most energetic thing thus far in his twenty-odd years of life. He jumped out of the window.

What happens from then on, and the way Charlie runs, his encounters with his uncle who very specifically does not help him escape, his own growing astonishment at the menace all around him, his encounters with the higher-ups in the Syndicate, his encounters with the police, and finally his encounter with Chloe, add up to a breathlessly fast-paced and very amusing mystery, with a rare antic quality.

All in all, THE FUGITIVE PIGEON is a delight, and Charlie Poole is a living doll.

Can a peace-loving pacifist from a tiny downstate New York Village named Greenwich find happiness in the middle of a mob of dedicated assassins?

This is the question our hero, J. Eugene Raxford, asks himself while ducking bullets, bombs, karate chops and-ultimately — swords, in this latest exploit on the rollicking edge of suspense from the author of The Fugitive Pigeon and The Busy Body.

The answer to J. Eugene’s question, both hilarious and scarifying, will keep you simultaneously on the edge of your seat and rolling in the aisles, and if you think that’s a tough trick, wait till you see our hero pouring evaporated milk on the microphone in his refrigerator, or taking orders from his watch (it talks to him in a tiny tinny voice), or traipsing off into low adventure and high comedy with Angela Ten Eyck, the beautiful if not brilliant peacenik daughter of the world’s most pugnacious munitions manufacturer.

Dragooned by a typographical error into as daffy a league for the destruction of the world as the world has ever seen, our hero is as disheartened as the FBI to discover that he and he alone is in a position to end the nefarious doings — from the inside. Given a crash program in spy survival techniques, J. Eugene Raxford is thrust into the breach, where he would have preferred not to have been honored. His adventures and escapes, the intricacy of the plot as slowly he unravels it and it unravels him, and the ultimate triumph of very good Good over absolutely villainous Evil, all add up to either the season’s most terrifying comedy or funniest hair-raiser, or maybe both.

Эдвард ЛЕРНЕР. СОЗИДАЙ УНИЧТОЖАЯ. Герой получает видеопослание от своей погибшей подруги. И начинает понимать: обстоятельства ее смерти не так просты…Элизабет ВОНАРБУР. НЕТОРОПЛИВАЯ МАШИНА ВРЕМЕНИ. Путешествуя по вселенным, главное — не заплутать в собственных чувствах.Андрей ПЛЕХАНОВ. ДУША КЛАУСА ДАФФИ. Скучно на этом свете, господа… без забот, болезней и старости.Айзек АЗИМОВ. ВЗГЛЯД НАЗАД. …или практикум для начинающих фантастов.Дональд УЭСТЛЕЙК. ПОБЕДИТЕЛЬ. В будущем все будет образцовым, и тюрьмы тоже.Эндрю СТЕФЕНСОН. ДОГОВОР. Герою делают предложение, от которого невозможно отказаться.Любомир НИКОЛОВ. ЛЕС. Последняя битва Адольфа Бонапарта.Джайм Линн БЛАШКЕ. ПРОЕКТ «ТАЙМСПЕН». Миллиарды инопланетных рас охотятся за незадачливым изобретателем.Александр ТЮРИН. ГИГАБАЙТНАЯ БИТВА. … о которой умалчивает история.Любовь и Евгений ЛУКИНЫ. СМЕРТЕЛЬНАЯ. Год назад журнал напечатал последнюю работу из архива знаменитого дуэта. А теперь — самая последняя.А также: Рецензии, Видеодром, Курсор, Критика, Судьба книги, Персоналии.