Por orden m?dica, Matt Scudder acaba de dejar el alcohol, pero mantenerse sobrio parece m?s dif?cil que mantenerse con vida, incluso en una ciudad como Nueva York. Una mole que, como Scudder sabe muy bien, puede aplastar a cualquiera. A pesar de su juventud, Kim tambi?n lo sab?a, y por so hab?a intentado escapar. Seguro que no merec?a la vida de prostituta que el destino le hab?a concedido, y sin duda no merec?a la muerte que le toc?, y que Scudder no pudo evitarle. Para redimirse, el ex polic?a tendr? que encontrar a quien ha convertido a la chica en papilla, y para ello, arriesgar lo que a?n queda de s? mismo. Esta novela le vali? a Lawrence Block el premio Edgar, y marca un hito en la vida de su gran personaje, Matthew Scudder.
Amazon.com ReviewMatt Scudder, the recovering alcoholic private eye from The Devil Knows You're Dead and A Ticket to the Boneyard, embarks on another descent into the nightmarish quarters of New York, this time to investigate the sex-for-sale industry. Hired by the brother of an heiress to investigate her rape and murder, Scudder tails her husband to a boxing match and notices another man whom he saw on video a few months earlier on a different case involving a snuff film. As Scudder calls on old friends for assistance and tours New York's dark physical and social landscapes, Block masterfully builds the pressure that leads Scudder to the violent resolution in this winner of the 1992 Edgar Award for best mystery novel.From Publishers WeeklyBlock masterfully builds the pressure in this Edgar Award winner, as newly sober Manhattan PI Matt Scudder investigates the death of a TV producer's wife.
From Publishers WeeklyThe newest Matt Scudder novel by the blessedly prolific Block is right up to his usual standards. It takes a while to set up the situation (someone in an exclusive male dinner club that meets once a year is killing off the members at an alarming rate), but once it's established, Matt gets his man by his usual patient attention to detail and sheer doggedness. He almost misses him, however (giving rise to a matchless last line), and the punishment meted out to the villain is a highly unusual variant on the kind Scudder thinks ...
It was all too frighteningly familiar. For the second time in his life, Alex Penn wakes up in an alcoholic daze in a cheap hotel room off Times Square and finds himself lying next to the savagely mutilated body of a young woman. After the first death, he was convicted of murder and imprisoned, then released on a technicality. But this time he has to find out what happened during the blackout and why-before the police do.Lawrence Block weaves his spell in this suspenseful taleof a man haunted by murders he hopes he hasn?tcommitted… It was all too frighteningly familiar. For the second time in his life, Alex Penn wakes up in an alcoholic daze in a cheap hotel room off Times Square and finds himself lying next to the savagely mutilated body of a young woman. After the first death, he was convicted of murder and imprisoned, then released on a technicality. But this time he has to find out what happened during the blackout and why? before the police do.
The first Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery. Introducing Bernie Rhodenbarr, N.Y.C.'s prince of thieves – who really should have known better! When the mysterious pear shaped man with a lot of uncomfortably accurate information about Bernie and his career offered him five big ones to liberate a blue leather box – unopened – from an East Side apartment, it would have been a good time to plead a previous engagement…but times were tough. Everything was straightforward – the box was where it should have been but before the liberation took place, two men in blue coats turned up. Still all was not lost, there was always a way to work things out…that was before they discovered the body in the bedroom and Bernie decided to leg it.
Jeff Flanders has a nice little job, a nice little wife, and absolutely nothing to get excited about. All that goes down the drain when he meets Candy, a small-town girl who looks as sweet as her name, but is bitter to the core. She offers him her body—the best he’s ever seen—for the bargain price of $1,000, and he can’t refuse. The affair turns Jeff’s world inside out, and he takes to her like she’s a drug, giving up half his paycheck every week for the privilege of taking Candy to bed.
Matt Scudder fue polic?a de Nueva York. Ahora es un detective sin licencia que saca las casta?as del fuego a sus amigos. Se divorci? de su mujer, y ahora vive en un modesto hotel del West Side. Pero su verdadero hogar se encuentra en cualquiera de los bares de su zona, la clientela habitual forma su familia. Corre el verano de 1975, y Matt anda comprometido con varios favores a amigos. En primer lugar, debe salvar de sospechas a Tommie Tillary, un hombre de negocios de ropas estridentes cuya mujer ha sido asesinada. Matt Scudder no dejar? de beber ni un instante, pero se mantendr? lo suficientemente l?cido como para encontrar la soluci?n, hallando la inspiraci?n en el fondo de la botella.
Nobody knows better than Matthew Scudder how far down a person can sink in this city. A young prostitute named Kim knew it also — and she wanted out. Maybe Kim didn't deserve the life fate had dealt her. She surely didn't deserve her death. The alcoholic ex-cop turned p.i. was supposed to protect her, but someone slashed her to ribbons on a crumbling New York City waterfront pier. Now finding Kim's killer will be Scudder's penance. But there are lethal secrets hiding in the slain hooker's past that are far dirtier than her trade. And there are many ways of dying in this cruel and dangerous town — some quick and brutal… and some agonizingly slow.
Matthew Scudder is finally leading a comfortable life. He's sober, he's married, and the state just gave him a private investigator's license. He's growing older, and he's even getting respectable. Then Scudder signs on to help his closest and most unlikely friend, the larger-than-life Hell's Kitchen hoodlum Mick Ballou. And all hell breaks loose. Scudder finds out he's not so respectable after all. He learns the spruced-up sidewalks of New York are as mean as they ever were, dark and gritty and stained with blood. And he discovers he's living in a world where the past is a minefield, the present is a war zone, and the future's an open question.
SO THIS GIRL WALKS INTO A BAR……and when she walks out there's a man with her. She goes to bed with him, and she likes that part. Then she kills him, and she likes that even better. On her way out, she cleans out his wallet. She keeps moving, and has a new name for each change of address. She's been doing this for a while, and she's good at it.And then a chance remark gets her thinking of the men who got away, the lucky ones who survived a night with her. She starts writing down names. And now she's a girl with a mission. Picking up their trails. Hunting them down. Crossing them off her list…
Keller’s a hit man. For years now he’s had places to go and people to kill.But enough is enough. He’s got money in the bank and just one last job standing between him and retirement. So he carries it out with his usual professionalism, and he heads home, and guess what?One more job. Paid in advance, so what’s he going to do? Give the money back? In Des Moines, Keller stalks his designated target and waits for the client to give him the go-ahead. And one fine morning he’s picking ...
Keller is a regular guy, a solid citizen. He goes to the movies, watches the tube, browses the art galleries, and works diligently on his stamp collection. But every now and then a call from the breezily efficient Dot sends him off to kill a total stranger. He takes a plane, rents a car, finds a hotel room, and gets back before the body is cold.He's a real pro, cool and dispassionate and very good at what he does. Until one day when Dot breaks her own rule and books him for a hit in New York, his home base. She sends him to an art gallery opening, and the girl he gets lucky with steers him to an astrologer.Then the jobs start to go wrong. Targets die before he can draw a bead on them. The realization is slow in coming, but there's no getting around it: Somebody out there is trying to hit the hit man. Keller, God help him has found his way onto somebody else's hit list.
Amazon.com ReviewA man known only as Keller is thinking about Samuel Johnson's famous quote that "'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'… If you looked at it objectively, he had to admit, then he was probably a scoundrel himself. He didn't feel much like a scoundrel. He felt like your basic New York single guy, living alone, eating out or bringing home takeout, schlepping his wash to the Laundromat, doing the Times crossword with his morning coffee… There were eight million stories in the naked city, most of them not very interesting, and his was ...
The New York Times bestselling author and master of the modern mystery returns with a fierce and poignant new novel featuring his acclaimed killer-for-hire, KellerJohn Keller is everyone's favorite hit man: a new kind of hero for a new, uncertain age. He's cool. Reliable. A real pro: the hit man's hit man. The inconvenient wife, the aging sports star, the business partner, the retiree with a substantial legacy. He's taken care of them all, quietly and efficiently.Keller's got a code of honor, though he'd never call it that. And he keeps the job strictly business. "...
Unlicensed PI Matthew Scudder returns after a three-year absence to investigate the murder of a wealthy couple savagely slain in their Manhattan townhouse. Matt's now 62, and his age shows in this relatively sedate outing. There's less violence than in many cases past, and the urban melancholy that pervaded his earlier tales has dissipated, replaced by a mature reckoning with the unending cycle of life and death. The mystery elements are strong. To the cops, the case is open-and-shut: the perps have been found dead, murder/suicide, in Brooklyn, with loot from the townhouse in their possession. Matt enters the ...
Una joven prostituta aparece asesinada en un apartamento de Greenwich Village. El principal sospechoso acaba de suicidarse en la c?rcel. La polic?a de Nueva York ha cerrado el caso, pero el padre de la v?ctima quiere reabrirlo. Y nadie mejor que Matthew Scudder para buscar respuestas en un entorno s?rdido de perversi?n y placeres… Un mundo donde los hijos se ven abocados a morir para expiar los pecados m?s secretos de sus padres.La novela negra norteamericana tiene tres grandes autores: los cl?sicos son Dashiell Hammett y Raymond Chandler. El tercero se llama Lawrence Block.
Brand-new stories by: Jeffery Deaver, Lawrence Block, Charles Ardai, Carol Lea Benjamin, Thomas H. Cook, Jim Fusilli, Robert Knightly, John Lutz, Liz Mart?nez, Maan Meyers, Martin Meyers, S.J. Rozan, Justin Scott, C.J. Sullivan, and Xu Xi.
It’s a jungle out there. Literally. At least for Evan Tanner, eternally sleepless sometime superspy, who finds himself in Africa on the trail of the AWOL ruler of tiny Modonoland. It seems the petty despot’s gone missing, and he’s taken the state treasury along with him. No stranger to impossible missions and international peril, Tanner’s been in over his head before. This time, however, he’s in imminent danger of being buried alive. And it all has to do with the CIA, white supremacists, moderate revolutionaries… and a blond jungle bombshell named (no joke!) Sheena. Tanner’s always been a sucker for a pretty face and a curvaceous body, especially one that’s wrapped in leopard skin. But this red hot renegade daughter of a local missionary is a man-eater. Which means this time Tanner’s goose is well and truly cooked.
Cold War superspy Evan Tanner lost the ability to sleep on a battlefield in Korea. So where the heck has he been since the ’70s? Frozen. Cryogenically. A Tanner-sicle. Which he never thought would happen when he walked into a basement in Union City, New Jersey, more than a quarter century ago. Now he’s unthawed and ready to rumble, and his somewhat addled, former super-secret boss, “the Chief,” is glad his favorite operative’s active again. Tanner awoke to a different world, though some bad things have remained the same… or gotten worse. Even before he can fully acclimate himself to this perplexing future, Tanner’s off to Burma (which isn’t really Burma anymore) to pose as a monk, destabilize the government, dodge a lethal double-cross, and rescue a beautiful prisoner. The world’s still full of conspiracy, corruption, greed, political chicanery – and beautiful women. So Tanner’s back with a vengeance, with a lot of lost time to make up for.
The Cold War’s boiling over. Global tensions are near the breaking point. So what’s the perfect assignment for a super-spy who hasn't slept since the Korean conflict? A fun-filled trip to the Montreal World’s Fair! The adorable little girl he's escorting – who, under different circumstances, would be sitting on the Lithuanian throne – can hardly contain her excitement, but it isn’t all playtime for Evan Tanner. Some mysterious disappearances, apparently linked to the fair’s Cuban exhibition, need to be looked into. Keeping his mind on business, however, won’t be easy after an insatiable lovely in a tiger skin falls into Tanner’s arms, and a mother lode of dangerous drugs falls into his lap. But the biggest, deadliest surprise is the terrorist plot Tanner’s tumbling into, and he’ll have to think and act quickly to prevent the visiting queen of England from being blown to smithereens.
Sometime spy Evan Tanner has accepted impossible assignments for many reasons: money, thrills, to have something to occupy his waking hours (twenty-four of them every day, in fact, since battlefield shrapnel obliterated his brain’s sleep center). But this might be the first time he’s put his life on the line… for love. Tanner’s agreed to smuggle a sexy Latvian gymnast – the lost lady love of a heart-sick friend – out of Russia. With the Cold War at its chilliest and the Iron Curtain slammed shut, this will not be easy, especially since everybody in Eastern Europe, it seems, wants to tag along, including a subversive Slav author and the six-year-old heir to the nonexistent Lithuanian throne. But that’s not the biggest hurdle. The gymnast refuses to budge unless Tanner rescues her eleven delightfully limber teammates as well – and that might be raising the bar too lethally high for even the ever-resourceful Evan Tanner to clear.
The CIA, the FBI, the KGB, Interpol – not one of the world’s premier intelligence organizations knows quite what to make of Evan Michael Tanner. Is he a spy, a mercenary, a footloose adventurer, or simply a screwball sucker for hopeless causes? (Actually he’s a little bit of all of the above. Plus he never sleeps. Ever.) One thing’s for sure: Tanner’s a true romantic, which is why he can’t refuse a distraught mother who begs him to rescue her lost, pure-as-driven-snow daughter. Phaedra Harrow (nee Deborah Horowitz) once shared Tanner’s apartment but not his bed. And now the virginal beauty’s been abducted by white slavers in the Afghan wilderness. Finding Phaedra will be difficult enough. Bringing her back alive and unmolested may be impossible. And first Tanner will have to swim the English Channel, survive trigger-happy Russian terrorists… and maybe pull off a timely assassination or two.
Amazon.com ReviewLawrence Block is such a gifted writer that even a native New Yorker will be fooled into thinking that the Paddington Hotel, described in the opening pages of Burglar in the Rye, is a real institution. Block's descriptions of this enclave of artists, writers, and rock musicians is thoroughly convincing-although in actuality, the Paddington is a combination of the real-life Chelsea Hotel and Block's outrageous imagination.This is Bernie Rhodenbarr's ninth heist. Bernie is a gentleman burglar who runs a used bookstore in between criminal acts, steals mostly from the rich, and only hurts ...
What's Bernie Rhodenbarr doing in the country? He is a New York kind of guy, an urbane antiquarian bookseller who moonlights as a buttoned down burglar. Until an impossibly rare Raymond Chandler novel dedicated to Dashiell Hammett lures him and his buddy, Carolyn, from their own turf to the hills of Western Massachusetts. Before they knows it, they're smack in the middle of Agatha Christie country and you know what that means. A classic English country house. A guest list awash in eccentricity. And the snow keeps falling. And the bridge is out. And the phone lines are cut. And, one by one, somebody's killing off the guests. And…shhhh! There's a burglar in the library!
