From the Introduction by Ed Gorman: If there's one thing Dick Lupoff understands (with perverse glee) it's the sorry state of the human condition. In this collection you'll find a wide variety of humans whose conditions leave much to be desired. A pit bull owner who's just as nasty as his dog A thief who believes his father-in-law was a real Nazi A dead-end boxer who has come back in a boxing movie A detective named Caligula Foxx who might be Nero Wolfe in drag A crooked corporal whose payoff is death Not only are the storylines original, the writing is indelibly stamped with Dick's vision and voice. Dick's writing talents really can't be defined by the usual means. Yes, he writes science fiction. Yes, he writes fantasy. Yes, he writes mystery. But what he really writes are Lupoffs. Long, short, hilarious, whimsical, dark, mysterious-they're all Lupoffs. Richard A. Lupoff is the author of many books including the popular Lindsey-and-Plum mysteries. The next of these, The Emerald Cat Killer, will be published by St. Martin's Press in October, 2010. His most recent collection of mysteries is Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix, published by Crippen & Landru.

Jazz-loving New York police detective Noah Green, trying to find a killer on New York's Lower East side, finds himself trying, at the same time, to ward off the depredations of the Internal Affairs Division

Vera Caspary, the famed author of Laura , gives us another gripping crime drama, told through shifting points of view. John Ansell, young and idealistic editor of Truth and Crime magazine, wants to breathe new life into the stale and formulaic publication. Instead of rehashing a story that's already been proven popular elsewhere, he finds a fresh one: the murder of Warren G. Wilson, famed figurehead of a correspondence course. The murder itself isn't too remarkable--just a bullet in the back--but the victim is another case, as it becomes apparent that despite having a household name, nothing is known about him. Perhaps even more peculiar is how Ansell's boss absolutely refuses to run the story and, soon thereafter, Ansell is poisoned. Caspary masterfully allows the truth to slowly untangle in this incredibly woven mystery, finally available as an ebook.

SHANGHAI FLAME Alex Cloud knows he's being followed. He only has a short period of time to find Flame and bring her back to the ship in order to leave Shanghai alive. China has turned Red, and an American newspaperman's life has turned worthless. Dodging from one risky situation to the next, Cloud runs into Haigmann, a canny middle-man who seems to think Cloud has something of value. Eventually Cloud finds Flame, but she wants nothing to do with him. Undaunted, he's sworn to get her out of Shanghai, but now finds himself carrying a lethal pack of cards with a microfilm of names glued into them. Now they're both on the run, trying to stay one step ahead of the spies and thieves who want that film--ready and willing to kill anyone to get it. COUNTERSPY EXPRESS "Don't get ... mixed up with a woman. My mistake..." The dying words of Jim Cabot's European contact ring in his ears as finds himself being trailed by one woman and tempted by another. His mission is to locate Borsilov, a defected Russian scientist. His predecessor, Max Becker, died trying. And already Cabot has been knocked senseless and his life threatened by two gunmen as he tries to track down the missing scientist. Behind the threats is an Italian Red named Major Racasoli. Pitted against them all is an English opportunist, Sydney Jardine, who wants to sell Borsilov to the highest bidder. But those dying words of warning mean nothing to Cabot now, because he has met Pia--and all bets are off.

LOOK BEHIND YOU, LADY What a pickup line! Bruce Flemish is getting ready for his magic act at the Hotel China Seas in Macao when the girl sits down next to him at the bar and offers her room number. But this casual meeting is anything but. Donna Van Deerlin is looking for a hero. Her father was killed trying to get information to Hong Kong about a local opium ring. Donna has her father's notes in code. But getting them out of Macao will take courage. Bruce is sure she must have the wrong guy--he's just an itinerant magician. But before long Donna is working her magic on him, and Bruce is trying to stay one step ahead of a gang of murderers who want to get their hands on the notes as well. THE VENETIAN BLONDE Skelly stumbles into Venice with a gangster on his tail and his card dealing confidence blown to hell. He feels washed up. That's when he runs into Viola, a young blonde in a black swimsuit sitting at the end of the bar. He can't shake her. And he needs to, because Skelly is in town to hit up his old friend Rinny Jim for some quick cash. Instead he finds Rinny's beautiful wife Maggie, and a very sweet deal--a million-dollar con to bring a rich dame's nephew back from the dead. Now he's got two women after him, and all that sweet green tempting him to one last score. Skelly's problems have only begun.

Review "...This (is) a warning to anyone who thinks that anything less than total civil rights for everyone would be ...acceptable..." -- - Mark Shepherd, Author of BLACKROSE Product Description Mickey Derringer is having a hell of a year. A year filled with loss, crushing disappointment, personal tragedy, physical trauma, mental anguish, and constant change. It's also a year of personal triumphs, growth, love and enlightenment. All while she's trying to catch the worst serial killer the city has ever known. A murderer whose modus operandi reopens old wounds and rekindles her worst nightmares. About the Author Selina Rosen has sold several stories to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, two of which were reprinted in anthologies. She has also sold stories to the Iguana Informer, Cosmic Debris, Distant Journeys, Such A Pretty Face, Personal Demons, and a few other magazines and anthologies. Two of her novels, Queen of Denial and Chains of Freedom, were published in 1999 and 2001 by Meisha Merlin Publishing. Meisha Merlin will be publishing Chains of Destruction in May of 2002, Recycled (the sequel to Queen of Denial) in 2003, and Chains of Deliverance (the third and final book in the Chains trilogy) in 2004. She also has several novels, novellas and stories in anthologies that are available through Yard Dog Press, and Yard Dog will be publishing another one of her novels, Hammer Town, in 2002. Ms. Rosen says, "If you're reading this, then you've already bought one of my books. Come to my website and let me know how you like it, or just talk - I really like to talk!!"

Prior to World War II, black actors were restricted to minor roles in mainstream films - though there was a 'black' Hollywood that created films with all-black casts for exhibition to black audiences. When a cache of long-lost films is discovered by cinema researchers, the aged director Edward 'Speedy' MacReedy appears to reclaim his place in film history. But insurance investigator Hobart Lindsey and homicide officer Marvia Plum soon find themselves enmeshed in a frightening web of arson and murder with its roots deep in the tragic events of a past era...

A valuable cache of stolen comic books originally brought insurance investigator Hobart Lindsey and police officer Marvia Plum together. Their tumultuous relationship endured for seven years, then ended as Plum abandoned her career to return to the arms of an old flame, while Lindsey's duties carried him thousands of miles away. Now, after many years apart, the two are thrown together again by a series of crimes, beginning with the murder of an author of lurid private-eye paperback novels and the theft of his computer, containing his last unpublished book...

Pander wore dark glasses and fancy suspenders and he moved into the San Pietro rackets like a sandblaster gone berserk. Fell, the boss, was mysteriously away, and Pander grabbed the chance to bury his hands in the heavy money. Then Fell came back. At his side was Cripp, the human adding machine with the beautiful face and the twisted leg. With them came murder... wholesale.

WAR OF THE DONS The Guarda brothers run capo Messina's territory. Pepe, the oldest, is the muscle. Nuncio, the younger brother, is the accountant. And Marco, he's the wolf. Restless, hungry, he's through taking orders. It's his idea to get rid of Messina and take over. But to do that, the hit has got to look like an accident, or they risk the wrath of Messina's boss, Don Angelo. So Marco hires a twitchy drug addict with a penchant for danger, a guy who knows how to turn Messina's simple hospital visit into a fatality. It's all going so well, so smoothly. Then Don Angelo steps in to take control, and the Guarda brothers really go to war. BLACK MAFIA Cutter used to be part of the movement, but got busted for knocking over a bank. He did his time, now he's out. But things have changed. His former mentor is now a teacher, and wants nothing to do with him. It's all Cutter can do to stay one step ahead of the Man. And now some white guys are coming into the Belt to stir up trouble, busting the local action and making it look like a Perrini job. But Perrini is quite happy with the status quo. Sure he skims the Belt, but he's not looking for trouble. Trouble finds him anyway in the form of Don Santino's nephew, Angelo, who's got a hidden agenda all his own. And that's when Cutter figures it's time to make his move.

Charley's Rope was about frayed out. The caribinieri were after him, he had a bullet in his hip and no goddamn passport. Charley needed a passport bad. He needed that intricate piece of paper--signed, sealed, and innocent looking--the way only a G.I. in italy could need one. A G.I. deserter with a sweet fortune in blackmail lire and the carabinieri lusting to lay hands on him...

"Set in New York's Lower East Side in the 1970's, when it was fast becoming the heart of the cultural underground, jazz club owner Pablo Waitz, takes us on a journey in search of his partner's killer. If The Tin Angel offers a murder to be solved, a world of crime to be explored, it also offers a search for other truths. For both in murder and in life, Pablo discovers that the past can be as dangerous as the present. The drug/jazz world of New York's East Village has seldom been rendered more honestly or graphically than in this fine first mystery."- Publishers Weekly

Wieder Gut Machung-making good again-reparations. In London, James Raison, a lawyer, was preparing to take a quick trip to Munich in the interest of his client, Mrs. Wolff, and the estate of her late father, Helmut Bamberger. Bamberger had been a very wealthy and very complex man who had, apparently, died in a Nazi concentration camp. In Tel Aviv, Dr. Grunwald, an elderly lawyer who had been crippled by the Nazis, was planning to go to Munich, too, as the representative of a Jewish organization intensely interested in the fate of Bamberger's fortune. In pre-holocaust Germany, Grunwald had represented Bamberger and had helped him get the bulk of his money safely into a Swiss bank. In Munich, the German lawyer in charge of the Bamberger case, Heinz Haffner (who took pride in not actually having been a Nazi, though his sister still was one), was preparing to meet with his colleagues to discuss some puzzling new elements in the case. Haffner had problems of his own. So did the English and the Israeli lawyers. And even when one means to concentrate on the business at hand, one's mind sometimes strays. Even with three good lawyers at work, the Bamberger question became frustrating, mystifying, and, at last, explosive --

"She's beautiful," writes Irish-American art historian Patricia Dolan in the first of the journal entries that form The Music Lesson. "I look at my face in the mirror and it seems far away, less real than hers." The woman she describes is the subject of the stolen Vermeer of the novel's title. Patricia is alone with this exquisite painting in a remote Irish cottage by the sea. How she arrived in such an unlikely circumstance is one part of the story Patricia tells us: about her father, a policeman who raised her to believe deeply in the cause of a united Ireland; the art history career that has sustained her since the numbing loss of her daughter; and the arrival of Mickey O'Driscoll, her dangerously charming, young Irish cousin, which has led to her involvement in this high-stakes crime. How her sublime vigil becomes a tale of loss, regret, and transformation is the rest of her story. The silent woman in the priceless painting becomes, for Patricia, a tabula rasa, a presence that at different moments seems to judge, to approve, or to offer wisdom. As Patricia immerses herself in the turbulent passions of her Irish heritage and ponders her aesthetic fidelity to the serene and understated pleasures of Dutch art, she discovers, in her silent communion, a growing awareness of all that has been hidden beneath the surface of her own life. And she discovers that she possesses the knowledge of what she must do to preserve the things she values most.

Grover Graft, 29, investigative reporter for the Times-Herald of Albany, N.Y. is the chatty narrator-hero of this thriller -- which centers on a fiendish religious cult. Grover, despite resistance from his stodgy bosses at the "rag," keeps digging into the doings of a local cult called the Children of Abraham -- especially when a suburban couple begs him to search for their daughter, who disappeared after joining the cult's California branch. Undeterred by harassment by the cult, Grover is soon heading out to San Francisco -- where his sleuthing almost immediately seems to lead to the throat-cutting of an ex-cultist informer. Back east, the trail leads to a cult farm in Vermont -- where Grover catches a glimpse of his old flame Lisa Hurlbett, twin sister of his old pal Jim, who was recently found mutilated, pieces of the carefully dismembered body turning up at landfills across Vermont. After quitting his newspaper job, Grover goes it alone against the cult -- unmasking its shadowy guru, battling several crazies, surviving various ordeals and chases ... and exposing a lurid scheme involving lobotomy, incest, drugs, homosexuality, and blackmail.

"Lasting only one issue, Spirit World is an eclectic and stunning mix of horror, mystery and fantasy. This edition also includes stories by Jack Kirby that were originally intended for a second issue of Spirit World as well as an introduction by comics historian and Kirby biographer Mark Evanier."--P. [4] of cover. Includes works inked by Mike Royer.

After being released from the Elmira reformatory Mitch (the central character of Cry Tough ) has two ways to go. He could return to his family who loved him dearly, find a job and marry the girl who loved him. His other choice is the flashy, dangerous life as a hood with big risks and big rewards- cars, women, rich food and fancy apartments. Would he settle for the security of a job and family or would he take the road from which there was no turning back? In a classic story, Irving Shulman presents the struggle of one man. The allure of his life in the underworld, the sobering reality of his home life, what he really loves, what he really wants and how each element in his fragmented reality draws on him.

From the the Academy Award]-nominated screenwriter of "Breakfast at Tiffanys" and "The Manchurian Candidate" comes a story unavailable for almost 50 years. A New York literary agent in love with a Hollywood starlet risks his life to uncover the secret behind a Nobel Prize-winning authors lost final manuscript.

When TV star Suzannah Piper is killed in a tragic car accident, many publicly grieve but few genuinely mourn. But investigative journalist Lucy Strong mourns. When Lucy first arrived in London, it was Suzannah who helped her realize her dream. But as Lucy starts to uncover the secret life that Suzannah kept even from her, she realizes that her friend was playing a dangerous game, and soon her own life is under threat. . . "From the Paperback edition.