Hard Case Crime

Cool & Lam Mystery #13 (1952) John Carver Billings II has a story with more holes in it than the surgeons had to sew up in the torso of recuperating LA Mob boss Gabby Garvanza. On the other hand, Billings has also promised Bertha Cool a $500 bonus on top of the usual agency fees. Donald Lam's concerns fall on ears deafened by the sound of Bertha's office cash drawer slamming shut on Billings' initial payment of $300 in cold, hard cash. Not that their client is in any way implicated in the botched Garvanza hit. Billings' style runs more to hitting on attractive women in cocktail lounges. Twice in short order, according to him. "Morrie" was the first pick-up. Billings swears he didn't know she was in fact Maurine Auburn, Gabby Garvanza's girlfriend and a witness to his unfortunate encounter with a lead double-tap. Didn't learn anything about that side of things until days later, when the newspapers reported her mysterious disappearance--after a cocktail lounge pick-up separated her from her companions. But she isn't the missing person Billings wants the agency to find. He claims she ditched him almost immediately, and he then moved on to a twosome, "Sylvia" and "Millie." That's where his tale really starts leaking like a sieve. He says flat-out that he's paying Cool & Lam to deliver Sylvia and Millie as an alibi. It's the gaps between his words that have Donald Lam hearing alarm bells.

Detective Matt Cordell was happily married once, gainfully employed and sober; but that was before he caught his wife cheating on him with one of his operatives and took it out on the man with the butt end of a .45. Now Matt makes his home on the streets of New York and his only companions are the city's bartenders.

"When her younger sister is found at the center of a brutal murder investigation, tough-as-nails Sheriff Normandy Gold is forced to dive headfirst into the seedy world of 1970s prostitution and soon discovers a twisted conspiracy leading right to the White House. Sex, violence and corruption collide in this gritty vigilante thriller set in 1970s Washington DC" -- summary from amazon.com.

"He'd been a promising piano prodigy, once. Now he was just an addict, scraping to get by, letting his hunger for drugs consume him. But a man's life can always get worse - as Ray Stone discovers when he wakes up beside a beautiful nightclub singer only to find her dead... and 16 ounces of pure heroin missing."--Page 4 of cover.

When he murders his blackmailing mistress on the day of his wedding, Prescott Marshall goes on the run with his new bride, in this gripping noir crime novel, lost for more than half a century and never before published under the author's real name. By the author of Rear Window .

A kidnapping scam goes bang, and keeps going bang until almost everyone is dead.

The bagmen who transport money for organized crime live by a set of rules: no personal relationships, no ties, no womenand never, ever look inside the bag you're carrying. Paul Page was the perfect bagman, despite suffering from a rare brain disorder. But that ended the day he saw a beautiful Mob wife become a Mob widow. Now Paul is going to break every rule he's lived by'even if it means he might be left holding the bag.

Joe Marlin was used to scoring easy money from gullible women. He meets and falls in love with Mona. When he steals some luggage, he finds a block of heroin inside. Mona is married, coincidentally, to the owner of the stolen suitcases.

Ambitious mobster Tony Romero takes the world of organized crime by storm as he conquers the prostitution industry in San Francisco, but loses his humanity during his journey to the top.