Kisses of Death contains the previous unpublished title novella, in which Heller becomes Marilyn Monroe’s bodyguard and solves the famous Bodenheim murders.

After Mike Hammer witnesses Wall Street superstar Vincent Colby getting clipped by a speeding red Ferrari, the shaken victim’s stockbroker father hires Hammer to find the driver. But the toughest private eye of them all soon is caught up in a series of bizarre, seemingly unconnected slayings marked by a forbidden martial arts technique.

When Crane, a graduate journalism student, hears that his fiancée has committed suicide, he’s immediately suspicious and launches into an investigation of her death. The tiny New Jersey town she lived in has seen a rash of suicides lately, with the unlikely coincidence that everyone who has died worked for Kemco, the chemical factory company that fuels the town’s economy.As Crane digs deeper, he encounters Boone, a local woman writing a book about the environmental destruction that has come at the hands of the local chemical giant. The two team up to unravel the conspiracies surrounding the factory — which soon makes them the next targets for those aiming to keep Kemco’s shady dealings under wraps.The pair races to expose the illegal operations poisoning the town and bring Kemco to justice — before either of them becomes the latest in the growing list of “suicides.”

Collins provides a vivid portrait of college-town life in the Vietnam years as Nolan does a favor for an old-time Mafia friend and tries to find out how his daughter was killed. Was it really a suicide like the police say? Or was she involved somehow in the circle of drugs that was so pervasive in the college scene? Nolan risks his life investigating a Mafia family's involvement in the girl's death to help out his old pal.

This delightful husband-and-wife collaboration features three stories by two-time Shamus award-winner Max Allan Collins, four stories by acclaimed short-story writer Barbara Collins, and two stories that the couple co-wrote.Among the contributions from Max Allan Collins — whose credits include novels, nonfiction, film criticism, songwriting, and four independent films — is “Catgate,” in which a womanizing senator tries to replace his dead mistress with a lookalike.Barbara Collins’ work has been included in the first three volumes of The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories. Her pieces include “The Inconvenience Store,” in which a late-night craving drives a pregnant private eye out to a convenience store and into a hostage situation; and “Seeing Red,” where PMS meets road rage and leads to tragedy.And the talented duo conspired on “Eddie Haskell in a Short Skirt,” the story of a father-daughter private eye team who hire an office manager and become the suckers in a scam.

A business trip that brings Mallory from his Iowa home to New York City has been stretched to include his playing a “suspect” in a mystery weekend at Mohonk Mountain House, the rambling upstate New York resort that almost seems to have been designed as backdrop to a murder — real or fictional. In its winding halls and unexpected nooks and crannies, avid fans to try to solve a “crime” acted out by a gaggle of mystery writers, their spouses and companions. Mallory, along with his lover, Jill Forrest, is looking forward to a weekend of fun and relaxation.Curt Clark, the crime writer who is stage-managing this annual outing, has trickily chosen the intended “victim” — mystery critic Kirk Rath, whose magazine has become influential enough to make or break a writer’s career and whose word processor is a thinly disguised dagger kept sharp on authors’ reputations.Author Mallory’s fictional crimes have a way of being topped by real ones, and this is no exception. Or is it? On their first night there, while Jill is incommunicado in the shower, Mallory sees what he believes to be a real murder from his bedroom window. But when he and Jill brave the snow to investigate, there is no body, no blood, no evidence of foul play. Either Mallory is the victim of a prank or this is a part of the crime enactment that Curt Clark was sneakily keeping to himself.Mallory is not convinced, however. And then he and Jill come across evidence that the murder is no joke, and that the snowstorm rapidly cutting off the mountain house from the rest of the world is quite possibly shutting in the game-players and staff with a real killer.

Return of a femme fatale. Beautiful, homicidal Julie has one lethal solution for every problem. And now Nolan and his sometime sidekick Jon have gotten on Julie's problem list. If a pair of out-of-town hitmen can't do the job, Julie will do it herself. Said the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “For fans of the hardboiled crime novel… this is powerful and highly enjoyable reading, fast moving and very, very tough.”

The saga of Dark Angel continues!Someone is killing normal humans in the fog-enshrouded city of Seattle. The murders are brutal and grisly, but inside Terminal City they barely cause a ripple of concern. The transgenics who live there have problems of their own. In an area under siege by the oppressive arm of the police, the transgenics must protect their fledgling colony against the outside world-a world that eyes them with contempt and suspicion... and will do anything to be rid of them.As the killings escalate, Joshua comes to Max with a dire suspicion: the killer may be one of their own. Tensions are high between normal humans and transgenics, and many inside the protected City would just as soon let the humans fend for themselves. Yet Max and her inner circle know they must investigate the crimes and stop the bloodshed. Doing nothing would simply give the normals more reasons to hate.But what they discover will shock even the most jaded among them-and expose a sinister agenda that leads to an old, nefarious foe...