The gang was restless, just looking for some idle fun, when they roughed up a man they thought was a homosexual. The game got out of hand; their victim was blinded.It was Paula Halstead’s bad luck to witness the attack and to catch a glimpse of one of the boys. He knows they must track her down and somehow or other make her keep her mouth shut. They find her alone in the house and, in their mindless way, decide that a gang rape would guarantee her silence.In this they are very successful. She commits suicide.When her husband, Professor Curtis Halstead, comes home from a late meeting, he finds her body and a cryptic note. From that moment, he begins to change from the complacent, philosophic, civilized man he has become to a single-minded weapon poised for vengeance. He retrains his body to what it had been when he was a young commando during the war. Slowly, methodically, he tracks down the boys responsible for his wife’s death. In his mind, they are murderers. A cynical homicide detective points out that the law won’t pursue them too diligently because even if they’re caught, their age protects them from severe sentence. He knows their punishment is in his hands and he intends to extract maximum revenge. He can think no further.A TIME OF PREDATORS is a novel of violence and suspense. Beyond that, it poses the perennially fascinating question of moral justification for an individual’s deeds. How far may one go to protect or avenge his own? How deeply do the accumulated layers of civilized training cover man’s aggressive instincts? Can Curtis Halstead, a dedicated teacher of philosophy, premeditate and execute the killing of four teenagers?THE GANG:Eric Dean, nineteen, darkly handsome, a charmer to women young and old, a magnetic leader of a group of four boys who ran around together in high school. His father is an insurance broker, well-to-do.Julio Escobar, eighteen, one of Rick’s followers and vaguely envious of Rick’s leadership. Julio’s parents work in a laundry, are God-fearing Spanish-American folks.Delbert “Heavy” Gander, eighteen, played tackle on the football team of which Rick was quarterback, Julio halfback. Immensely overweight, full of fears and tensions and insufficiencies. His widowed father is a sheet-metal worker, Heavy, a good mechanic.Ernest “Champ” Mather, twenty-one, fourth member of the gang. Quit high school when his football eligibility ended. Very low I.Q., devotedly doglike, but enjoys inflicting pain, extremely powerful. Too dumb for military service, works as a gardener.

Gustave Wallberg, President of the USA and Leader of the Free World, has a dark past.And it’s returned to haunt him.His head is in the sights of Halden Corwin — a man he thought was dead, a man with a sniper’s eye, an assassin’s mind and a grudge that goes back decades.Ex-CIA operative Brendan Thorne is the only man capable of stopping Corwin. But as he stalks his quarry through the frozen forests of Montana, Thorne discovers that the relentless greed and ruthless ambitions of Capitol Hill are far more deadly than the adversary he’s facing.Caught in a web of lies and deceit, it’s not the President’s life Thorne needs to save, it’s his own.

Neil Fargo was a hard-nosed private investigator with a business on the side: heroin. The investigating he did on his own; the drug line he shared with a man called Walter Harriss. Fargo was strong enough, cool enough, to live in two worlds, and tough enough to keep control of both. Until he hired Docker.Docker, Fargo explained to Harriss, was an old army buddy. He would make a damn good bag man. He could be trusted. So when a drug shipment arrived, Fargo set up a meeting: the drug courier, a chemist to test the drugs for purity, and Docker. All Docker had to do was hand over a briefcase full of money and collect the shipment. But Docker did more than that: the courier was found dead, the chemist beaten — the drugs and the money were gone. And Fargo had to answer to Harriss for Docker’s disappearance.INTERFACE is the story of a chase: Harriss and Fargo both know that if they don’t stop Docker from getting out of San Francisco, they’ll never see the drugs or the money again. They’ll do anything to stop him — and Docker will do anything to keep from getting caught. But it’s also the story of Fargo, a man walking the tightrope between two lives, determined to survive in both.

Dashiell Hammett and William Vollmann are just two treats in this stellar sequel to the smash-hit original volume of San Francisco Noir, which captures the dark mythology of a world-class locale.

A wonderfully dark, pitch-perfect noir prequel to The Maltese Falcon, featuring Dashiell Hammett’s beloved detective, Sam Spade.It’s 1921 — seven years before Sam Spade will solve the famous case of the Maltese Falcon. He’s just set up his own agency in San Francisco and he gets off to a quick start, working cases (he doesn’t do domestic) and hiring a bright young secretary named Effie Perrine. When he’s hired by a prominent San Francisco banker to find his missing son, Spade gets the break he’s been looking for. He spends the next few years dealing with booze runners, waterfront thugs, banking swindlers, gold smugglers, and bumbling cops. He brings in Miles Archer as a partner to help bolster the agency, though it was Archer who stole his girl while he was fighting in World War I. All along, Spade will tangle with an enigmatic villain who holds a long-standing grudge against Spade. And, of course, he’ll fall in love — though it won’t turn out for the best. It never does with dames.

Pulp fiction has been looked down on as a guilty pleasure, but it offers the perfect form of entertainment: the very best storytelling filled with action, surprises, sound and fury. In short, all the exhiliration of a roller-coaster ride. The 1920s in America saw the proliferation of hundreds of dubiously named but thrillingly entertaining pulp magazines in America: Black Mask, Amazing, Astounding, Spicy Stories, Ace-High, Detective Magazine, Dare-Devil Aces. It was in these luridly-coloured publications, printed on the cheapest pulp paper, that the first gems began to appear. The one golden rule for writers of pulp fiction was to adhere to the art of storytelling. Each story had to have a beginning, an end, economically-etched characters, but plenty going on, both in terms of action and emotions. Pulp magazines were the TV of their day, plucking readers from drab lives and planting them firmly in thrilling make-believe, successors...