The long-awaited sequel to 2006’s best-selling Miami Noir highlights an outstanding tradition of legendary writers exploring the dark side of paradise.

Here, for the first time in one volume, are the best stories of the year from Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine — featuring the incomparable Mike Shayne himself.

Whether you prefer your crimes brutal, clever, daring or disastrous... whether you relish a case with infinite complications or of deceptive simplicity, you will enjoy this superior collection by and for connoisseurs of crime.

Who’d ever think that things would reach such a pass in Miami that Mike Shayne would come to the rescue of his arch-enemy, Peter Painter?

Well, that’s the situation in the Redhead’s 40th case. The dapper chief of detectives of Miami Beach plays things just a little too close to his chest this time, concealing vital information that might clear a convicted murderer until the very last moment before his execution to cash in on the publicity value; and then getting himself kidnapped by a ruthless gang of killers who are determined to keep him out of circulation until an innocent man is electrocuted.

Mike Shayne really doesn’t care whether Peter Painter comes out of it alive or not — though he does realize that life would lose some of its savor if there were no Peter Painter for him to needle. But he is concerned about a miscarriage of justice... egged on by the lovely and willing wife of the accused man, and the lovely and not-unwilling widow of the victim.

Ironically enough, while all the clues point to Shayne as Painter’s probable kidnapper and while all the detectives of Miami and Miami Beach are combing the twin cities for the rangy Redhead, he is engaged in an electrifying struggle against time to locate Painter and save him despite himself.

It takes a bomb thrown into the hospital room of a paralyzed man (occupied by Shayne) and the deliberate sinking of a luxury cruiser in the waters of Biscayne Bay (with Painter trapped below decks) to bring this fast-paced story to an exciting and unpredictable climax.

This country’s toughest private eye, and Miami’s most-publicized citizen has never been in a tighter spot or fought his way through against greater odds.

If you watch the Redhead’s synthetic adventures on NBC TV every Friday night, you’ll enjoy reading this to discover what the original stories are really like.

In their heyday, the true-crime pulp magazines spawned many of the masters of American detective fiction. These early gems have been unearthed and collected here for the first time.

An unstoppable anthology of crime stories culled from Black Mask magazine the legendary publication that turned a pulp phenomenon into literary mainstream.

Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.

Featuring

• Deadly Diamonds

• Dancing Rats

• A Prize Fighter Fighting for His Life

• A Parrot that Wouldn’t Talk

Including

• Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as it was originally published

• Lester Dent’s Luck in print for the first time

Рассказ из сборника «От убийства на волосок» (Детективные и приключенческие рассказы писателей США и Латинской Америки).