Hard Case Crime
3 primary works • 10 total works
Book 28
On the mend after getting run out of Chicago, professional cardsharp Bill Maynard is hungry for some action - but not nearly as hungry as Joyce Rogers, the tantalizing wife of Bill's latest mark. Together they hatch an ingenious scheme to get rid of her husband. But in life as in poker, the other player sometimes has an ace up his sleeve...
Book 39
Anita Carbone was a good girl – and it bored her.
That’s why she took the long subway ride down to Greenwich Village, home of the Beats and the stoners, home to every kind of misfit and dropout and free spirit you could imagine. It was where she met Joe Milani, the troubled young war veteran with the gentle touch. But it was also where she met his drug-dealing roommate – a man whose unnatural appetites led to murder…
Book 163
"REAL NOIR... A GROTESQUELY MEMORABLE RIDE." - WALL STREET JOURNAL
TWO OF THE GREATEST AUTHORS OF NOIR FICTION IN AN UNFORGETTABLE COLLABORATION
An innocent woman lies dead in the street, felled by a stray bullet. Now it’s up to the woman who killed her to investigate the dead woman’s life and pick up its cut-short threads, carrying out a mission of vengeance on her behalf against the man she loved and lost – and the nightclub-singing femme fatale responsible for splitting them apart.
Begun in the last years of his life by noir master Cornell Woolrich, the haunted genius responsible for such classics as Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, and Phantom Lady, and completed decades later by acclaimed novelist and MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block (A Walk Among the Tombstones, Eight Million Ways to Die), INTO THE NIGHT – available here for the first time in more than 35 years – is a collaboration that extends beyond the grave, echoing the book’s own story of the living taking on and completing the unfinished work of the dead.
Johnny Hayden and Doug Rance had a scheme to take real estate entrepreneur Wallace Gunderman for all he was worth. But they needed a girl on the inside to make it work.
Enter Evelyn Stone: Gunderman’s secretary, his lover – and his worst enemy. Gunderman had promised to marry her, but never came through. Now she’s ready to make him pay…
There were five of them, each prepared to kill, each with his own reasons for accepting what might well be a suicide mission. The pay? $20,000 apiece. The mission? Find a way into Cuba and kill Castro.
This breathtaking thriller, originally published the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis under a pen name Lawrence Block never used before or since, is the rarest of Block’s books – and still a work of chilling relevance all these years later, with Castro and Cuba once again commanding headlines.
As a con man, Joe Marlin was used to scoring easy cash off gullible women. But that was before he met Mona Brassard – and found himself holding a stolen stash of raw heroin. Now Joe’s got to pull off the most dangerous con of his career, one that will leave him either a killer…or a corpse.
No one but multiple Edgar Award winner Lawrence Block could tell this story of dangerous men and wicked women, of greed and desire and nail-biting suspense. It will grab you by the throat on the first page and won’t let go till the breathless, unforgettable climax.
On the border between El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, five lives are about to collide - with fatal results. You'll meet
MARTY - the professional gambler who rolls the dice on a night with...
MEG - the bored divorcee who seeks excitement and finds...
LILY - the beautiful hitchhiker lured into a live sex show by...
CASSIE - the redhead with her own private agenda...
and WEAVER - the madman, the killer with a straight razor in his pocket, on the run from the police and determined to go down swinging!
This is MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block at his rawest and most visceral, a bloody, bawdy, brutal story of passion and punishment--and of lines that were never meant to be crossed.