Murder Room
19 total works
This is some household. The kid is a genius, the father a scientist of international repute. Money is a problem. Not a shortage of money, but the opposite: too much. The sort of money that brings the envious and the scheming clustering like flies around offal: nieces, nephews, cousins ... a family of mean minds and gross appetites.
The staff has its peculiarities, too: the chauffeur is an ex-con; the governess formerly a featured act in strip clubs from New York to Miami; and the secretary has a well-developed taste in other women.
Yes, it's some household - and not all that welcoming of PI Mike Hammer, not when the kid has been kidnapped and everyone's a suspect.
PI Mike Hammer is moving through the dark streets of New York City when he hears a child's terrible scream. When he finds the child, he also discovers the naked body of a beautiful woman who has been beaten to death with a whip.
So begins a complicated and baffling case, involving the deaths of other women and a newspaper reporter, who was tracking aspects of the case as well as following the lives of the city's prostitutes. Mike uncovers a sadistic ring of international figures, where women risk their lives for a fortune in an attempt to pull themselves out of despair.
Can Mike, with the help of his beloved Velda, break the ring that is crushing the lives of vulnerable women?
Morgan the Raider got his name from the famous pirate of old, as he stands convicted of stealing $40 million. He is good at getting himself out of jail, too; he has already escaped custody once.
Now he is offered the chance of a reduced sentence - but at risk of his life. For he must get into an escape-proof prison on a Caribbean island, a torture fortress known as the Rose Castle, in order to find and set free an important scientist. A CIA agent, Kim Stacy, is assigned the job of accompanying him - and keeping an eye on him at the same time.
But did Morgan really steal the money? And just who are the prisoners being held in the island fortress?
From the moment he walks into his Manhattan office to find his beloved secretary Velda knocked unconscious, and a brutally murdered stranger occupying his office chair, PI Mike Hammer is on the warpath. He's 'in a blind fury ready to blow somebody into a death full of bloody flying parts'. Whoever killed the stranger knew exactly the kind of message he wanted to leave, and he added a note for good measure - a note that implicates Mike.
Hammer finds himself pitted not only against the CIA, but also the State Department and the mob. He's going to need all the help he can get - including the latest IT - in his hunt for what may be the most vicious killer he's ever met.
Before Jack Reacher . . . there was Mike Hammer
One rainy night, Hammer sits brooding, alone, in a bar. But when he sees a desperate guy abandon his kid only to step outside and get blown away, Hammer's mood switches from bad to worse. By the time he reaches the man with the gun, the getaway driver has run him over to stop him talking. Hammer vows revenge on whoever's behind the crime.
The trail of vengeance pits Hammer against his police friend Pat Chambers, the DA and his stooges and lands him in a world of trouble from gangsters, where he gives as good as he gets . . .
. . . And leads back to Marsha, a beautiful former Hollywood actress, who has more to offer Hammer than meets the eye.
Before Jack Reacher . . . there was Mike Hammer
PI Mike Hammer is out for a late-night walk in the rain when he sees a woman being pursued across a bridge. He deals with the man, but, terrified, the woman jumps to her death.
Pat Chambers, Hammer's police department friend, identifies the pair as Communists. Hammer visits a meeting of the local party and is mistaken for a Soviet spy. Into the mix comes Oscar, the insane brother of a political candidate on an anti-corruption ticket, who Hammer must deal with so that the politician's career prospects aren't spiked. But is Oscar really what they say he is?
Meanwhile, Velda, Hammer's adored secretary, goes missing, and Hammer soon finds out that the two incidents are linked by a deadly thread . . .
Seven years of hitting the hard stuff have taken it out of PI Mike Hammer. That's how long it's been since he gave his beloved secretary the job from which she never returned.
Now he's back with a vengeance. Velda is alive, if only he can reach her in time. But New York's toughest investigator still has friends in the right places. And his long-neglected .45 is definitely one of those.
Piecing together the puzzling deaths of a senator, a newsagent and an FBI man, Hammer finds the missing link in a murderous network of international spies. One that turns out to be Spillane's kind of beauty - and who knows a good deal more than she should.
Tiger Mann is faced with one of the most frightening challenges of his career: to avert the imminent destruction of the defence system of the United States. An engineer has disappeared, taking with him the secret of the device he created: a method to by-pass the buttons which activate America's most deadly missiles - and render the system inoperative.
The Communists want more than anything else to discover the workings of the by-pass control, and Tiger is equally determined to see that they don't. But to prevent them, Tiger has to find the missing man first ...
And that's a job in itself.
Gill Burke is the toughest cop in New York, and he gets results. That is, until the mob decide he's too dangerous and pull strings, seeing him dishonourably removed from the force.
But Gill is still the only cop who knows how the mob operate, and when their top people start to be put out of business - violently - Gill is persuaded by a DA, who's running scared, to put his badge back on and find the killer.
Gill's investigation has hardly begun when he becomes involved with Helen, who is on the syndicate's payroll, and Helga, a Swedish blonde. But even with these diversions, Gill finds himself trapped in a bloody vendetta, pitted against a faceless assassin whose aim is destruction ...
Everyone thought Mike Hammer was dead, shot in a drugs war battle on the docks of New York. But now he's back from a stay in Florida, and in deeper trouble than ever before. He has the slaying of Marcus Dooley, an old army buddy, to pay back with interest - and two generations of a powerful Mafia family to beat at their own bloody games. Plus, just before he died Dooley revealed to Hammer that there's a missing cache of $89 billion to find - before the bad guys get their hands on it, and their sights on Hammer.
And to really complicate matters, the Feds have dealt themselves into the action, eager to beat everybody to the loot.
With two rock-hard fists, a well-oiled .45, his beautiful secretary, Velda, and a miracle, Hammer might just make it out of this one alive ...
Before Jack Reacher . . . there was Mike Hammer
Out-of-town salesman Chester Wheeler is an old war buddy of PI Mike Hammer's. Now he's dead, supposedly having shot himself after an all-night drinking session - as Hammer's guest. Hammer wakes up to the sound of the police questioning him, but he suspects murder. While the DA takes his PI and gun licences, Hammer gets out on the trail. Pushing his way through a swirl of gay bars and gaming clubs, high-price fashion models and not just a little blackmail, he realises someone is working hard to frame him. And, with the help of his police buddy, Pat Chambers, and secretary Velda - now holding her own PI licence - he's working hard to find out why.
Everywhere he turns, he keeps coming up against a blonde beauty named Juno. She holds the key to a crime wave that could unlock the mystery behind Chester's murder . . .
Lyncastle is a small town that likes to be dirty: gin joints, gambling dens and brothels make sure of that, and bring in more money than the State Capitol.
One night, a man named Johnny McBride returns to the town, and nobody is happy about it. Supposedly he ran away from embezzling and murder charges five years ago - he's believed to have killed no less than the town's DA. But Johnny doesn't scare easily when he's rousted by angry cops, or when harder men try to kill him. He's back to clear his name and settle some scores, and the forces that control the town from its shadows are nervous.
But is Johnny really the man everyone thinks he is?
Whoever he may be, his road to revenge isn't for the faint of heart . . .
Before Jack Reacher . . . there was Mike Hammer
One night, a blonde jumps out in front of PI Mike Hammer's car. She's so scared he doesn't have much choice but to give her a ride. At a police roadblock, he discovers she's on the run from a sanatorium, but he passes her off as his wife. Other people besides the police are after the blonde, and these people play rough. Real rough.
The blonde turns out to be the star witness against some big-time mobsters. Mike has blundered into something unimaginably big, but the Feds don't want him involved - and take his PI licence and gun.
For Mike, it's a chance to strike a blow against evil on a grand scale. He discovers that something representing a great deal of money, and a lot of power, has gone missing, and that some people will go to any lengths to get it back . . .
Deep was back in town after a twenty-five-year exile - to inherit an empire and avenge a death. He and Bennett had made the inheritance pact when they were kids; they had known that even New York was too small for them to share and so they had tossed a coin to determine who would stay and who would build his organisation in another town. Deep had lost and gone.
But now Bennett has been murdered in his own home and Deep is ready to prove he's strong enough to take over. Deep wants Bennett's killer, the others want Bennett's job. And all too many of them - including the beautiful Irish - want Deep dead . . .
New York PI Mike Hammer has traced his lost love and secretary, Velda, who went missing seven years ago. In a race against time, Mike has to move her to another location, but she is sheltering a young woman who fears for her life.
Finally safe once again, Hammer devotes his time to helping the young woman, who is being threatened by her stepfather. But as Hammer investigates some leads on the seedier side of town, he finds himself caught up in a three-decades-old mystery involving a great deal of money that's gone missing.
And just who is The Snake?
Mike is going to have to figure that one out, or three lives - his, Velda's and the girl's - are in danger.
Dogeron Kelly, a walking bomb of a man, suddenly appears in elegant - and not so elegant - New York circles with a suitcase containing a quarter of a million dollars. There are rumours, but no one is certain where he, or the money, came from. It seems he is out to claim his inheritance - or is there something else he is after?
Sharon Cass, for instance: a bright and beautiful girl with some very special gifts for the right man.
Whatever it is, Dog Kelly isn't telling, but his search takes in a baronial old family manor, the higher reaches of international illegal trafficking, paid mobsters and the rich and famous ...
The third of the Tiger Mann adventures calls on the master of counter-espionage to act as unofficial bodyguard to a visiting Arab king.
The American government is courting the visiting ruler for reasons of oil. The Communists want the king, too - but they'd prefer him dead. So Tiger has to outwit the principal Far East Communist agent, counteract Communist propaganda being fed to the king, entertain the monarch's beautiful fiance ...
... and still keep his lovely Rondine happy.