Stephen Blake comes from a long line of Galway Blakes, a family famous in history — or infamous — for jettisoning its Catholic roots to save their land from the English. As a young man he was always happiest when drinking with his mates, and a ready hand in a fight. With no particular plans in mind, he went up to study at Trinity College, and immediately afterward “took the king’s shilling” by joining the British army, and came out harder, leaner, and suspect in the eyes of his countrymen. Now nearly forty, he is a good man blown in bad directions. Out of misplaced loyalty he agrees to take part in an IRA bank heist. Doomed to failure from the start, it goes disastrously wrong when his friend is killed, and Stephen must leave Ireland, determined to reinvent himself as an American. Now he and girlfriend Siobhan, best friend Tommy, IRA terrorist Stapleton, and a particularly American sort of psychopath named Dade are all on a collision course somewhere on the road between the dive bars of New York and the pitiless desert of the Southwest.

In An Easeful Death, someone is killing beautiful young women and taking extraordinary risks to carefully pose their painted bodies in public places. The first is bronze, then silver who will be gold? Detective Sergeant Stevie Hooper, young, hard-edged and newly seconded to the Serious Crime Squad, finds herself haunted by increasingly disturbing flashbacks as the bizarre case unfolds. And, as she closes in on the killer, the carefully drawn line between her professional and personal life becomes increasingly blurred, till she doesnt know who can be trusted.

When a man finds a girl running his business, it’s bad... But when he finds his partner murdered — it’s terrible!

The sexes battle, the mind feuds with emotions it cannot control and crime extorts and strikes and kills but it does not pay in this collection of stories by Rex Stout at the outset of his celebrated career in mystery and suspense. Again and again in these tales taken from the pages of pulps that originally published him — from popular magazines like All Story Weekly, the Black Cat and the Smart Set — the creator of the immortal Nero Wolfe proves himself to be the master of the sudden reversal and unexpected revelation as he probes the thwarted heart, the wounded soul and the criminal intelligence.

In the fifth Leonid McGill novel, Leonid finds himself in an unusual pickle of trying to balance his cases with his chaotic personal life. Leonid’s father is still out there somewhere, and his wife is in an uptown sanitarium trying to recover from the deep depression that led to her attempted suicide in the previous novel. His wife’s condition has put a damper on his affair with Aura Ullman, his girlfriend. And his son, Twill, has been spending a lot of time out of the office with his own case, helping a young thief named Fortune and his girlfriend, Liza.

Meanwhile, Leonid is approached by an unemployed office manager named Hiram Stent to track down the whereabouts of his cousin, Celia, who is about to inherit millions of dollars from her father’s side of the family. Leonid declines the case, but after his office is broken into and Hiram is found dead, he gets reeled into the underbelly of Celia’s wealthy old-money family. It’s up to Leonid to save who he can and incriminate the guilty; all while helping his son finish his own investigation; locating his own father; reconciling (whatever that means) with his wife and girlfriend; and attending the wedding of Gordo, his oldest friend.

Игра, секс и месть — составляющие части жизни молодого человека, который испытывает искреннюю ненависть ко всему женскому роду.Лучшее развлечение — убийство невинных девушек. Карты — средство заработка. Жизнь — путь мстителя. Блюстители правопорядка бессильны перед его уловками. Женщины не могут устоять перед его очарованием.

Chicago, September 1964. Beatlemania sweeps the nation, the Vietnam War looms, and the Warren Commission prepares to blame a “lone-nut” assassin for the killing of President John F. Kennedy. But as the post-Camelot era begins, a suspicious outbreak of suicides, accidental deaths, and outright murders decimates assassination witnesses. When Nathan Heller and his son are nearly run down on a city street, the private detective wonders if he himself might be a loose end...Soon a faked suicide linked to President Johnson’s corrupt cronies takes Heller to Texas, where celebrity columnist Flo Kilgore implores him to explore that growing list of dead witnesses. With the blessing of Bobby Kennedy — former US attorney general, now running for Senator from New York — Heller and Flo investigate the increasing wave of violence that seems to emanate from the notorious Mac Wallace, rumored to be LBJ’s personal hatchet man.Fifty years after JFK’s tragic death, Collins’s rigorous research for Ask Not raises new questions about the most controversial assassination of our time.

Most of the translations from foreign languages in the text are my own, but for the quotation from Machiavelli’sThe Prince and the quotation from Virgil’s The Eclogues (though I have adapted the latter very slightly). I am indebted to the late scholars George Bull (1929–2001) and E. V. Rieu (1887–1972), respectively. —OLIVER BOWDEN, PARIS, 2010

From the files and pen of world renowned true crime writer Alan Hynd (1903–1974) comes a deliciously dark sampling of some of the most fascinating true murder cases of the first half of the 20th Century. These stories, the first of three short collections, are unified by a single theme: they all involve physicians. And not for the autopsy, but as perpetrators or accused perpetrators. You may never see your family care giver again in the same light.Told in the characteristic wry, anecdotal reportorial style that made Alan Hynd famous in his day (two wartime best sellers in 1943, contributions to The Reader's Digest, Colliers, Coronet, The Saturday Evening Post, True, Liberty, The American Mercury and almost every true detective magazine in print) these tales will have you cringing one minute, laughing the next, and gasping in shock a moment later. Truly, no one could make up classics like these. Take for example, the murder ring of South Philadelphia in which a faith healer and two Lotharios helped restless wives rid themselves of abusive unwanted husbands…or the respected French war hero who was a pillar of the community by day but prowled brothels and music halls by night and was caught with a cadaver sealed within the walls of his home….or the traveling physician who married a farmer's ex-wife and had four step-sons, then three, then two, then…And finally, as a bonus track, relax and savor the wickedly evil doings of "Sister Amy Archer" at the Archer convalescent home in Connecticut, where old folks checked out just a little too quickly for comfort. The events eventually became the basis of "Arsenic and Old Lace," the hit play and iconic movie.As the old adages go, you couldn't make this stuff up… and true crime is always farther out there than fiction.(With illustrations)