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with the murder of an author of lurid private-eye paperback novels and the theft of his computer, containing his last unpublished book...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

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

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.

Crime-writer Charles Applegate decided to set his second novel in a progressive school. Taking a job at Bramley Hall to see what such a school was like 'from the inside, ' Applegate found to his dismay that he was expected to do rather more than just people-watch. And when a murder took place on his first night there, his skills as a detective writer were called upon as well. But real-life crime was to prove very different from its fictional counterpart...

American-born John Wilson and his troop of distinguished friends were well known in the fashionable parts of London. And at their social gatherings the very latest fad was 'Immaterialism', and the quest for the perfect immaterial work of art - but what they hadn't expected to find was the perfect immaterial murder.

To research a new detective story, Charles Applegate takes a post in a progressive school of misfits, set deep in the English countryside. The game turns serious when a fellow teacher is murdered and a weird variety of criminals seem convinced that Charles has something they want.

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.

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.

With an introduction by Jonathan Coe 1930s King's Cross, London. When aspiring film actress Estella Lamare is found dead on the cutting-room floor of a London film studio, Cameron McCabe finds himself at the centre of a police investigation. There are multiple suspects, multiple confessors and, as more people around him die, McCabe begins to perform his own amateur sleuth-work, followed doggedly by the mysterious Inspector Smith. But then, abruptly, McCabe's account ends . . . Who is Cameron McCabe? Is he victim? Murderer? Novelist? Joker? And if not McCabe, who is the author of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor ?

New York City, the early 30's. A man is poisoned on a crowded streetcar during rush hour. Everyone saw him die, but no one saw the killer! And far too many people had good reason to hate Longstreet. The few clues lead up to a blind alley, and District Attorney Bruno and Inspector Thumm pay a call on Drury Lane. Drury Lane! Retired Shakespearean actor. Matinee idol. Master of disguise. Amateur sleuth who finds "crime the highest refinement of human drama." Ellery Queen's most flamboyant creation. Seated amid the splendor of the vast medieval halls of his castle on the Hudson, Drury Lane hears the story. Almost at once, he knows who the murderer is, but refuses to reveal his identity until he has sufficient evidence for the police to arrest him. In the great tradition, all the clues are scrupulously presented to you, the reader. Can you solve the case before the police?

The Big Fix by Ed Lacy Author of the 1958 Edgar Award-winning novel Room to Swing! On the night Irish Tommy Cork's murder was planned, nothing very much out of the ordinary happened. Tommy was in the ring, taking a pasting-as usual. Back to the ropes, almost sitting on the second strand, Tommy crouched, gloved hands up in front of his face like a leather fence. He was fighting a strong youngster who was now whaling away with both hands in a moment of wild enthusiasm. Most of his blows were blocked, or ducked by Tommy's weaving head, but those few that didn't miss landed with loud thud sounds on the kidneys, head, or in the stomach, visibly shaking up the pale "old man."