Softcover. NY, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 133 pages. William Collins is very handsome, very polite, and very friendly. He is also dangerous when aroused. Now Collins, a one-time boxer with a lethal "accident" in his past, has broken out of his fourth mental institution and met up with an affable con man and a highly arousing woman, whose plans for him include kidnapping, murder, and much, much worse. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Mulholland Books, reprint, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 208 pages. It was supposed to be only a temporary job -- something to pay the bills until Dusty could get his feet back on the ground and raise enough money for medical school. After all, there's nothing wrong with being a bellboy at a respectable hotel like the Manton -- that is, until she came along. Marcia Hillis. The perfect woman. Beautiful. Experienced. Older and wiser. The only woman to ever measure up to that other her -- the one whose painful rejection Dusty can't quite put from his mind. A richly-imagined crime narrative of the Oedipal and betrayal, A Swell-Looking Babe is Thompson at his very best -- a cornerstone in Thompson's enduring legacy as the Dimestore Dostoyevsky of American fiction. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Tucson AZ, Dennis McMillan, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Firmly rooted in the hard-boiled tradition, these 13 stories from Phillips showcase the cool exuberance of black Los Angeles PI Ivan Monk, whose family connections tend to prod him into taking cases no one in his right mind would investigate. Nostalgia is a recurrent theme, as in "Through the Fog Softly," which introduces Monk's father, Josiah Monk, as a soldier in Korea, and in Monk's love of 1950s and '60s cars. Some tales verge on fantasy, such as "The King Alfred Plan," which imagines a scheme to round up blacks into concentration camps. A pseudo-screenplay, "Bring Me the Head of Osama Bin-Laden," is the weakest effort in an otherwise strong collection. At his best, Monk displays something of the cockiness of Robert Parker's Spenser and the racial awareness of Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins. Monk has a toughness all his own, however, and a noir sensibility shines brightly in stories like "Lowball" and "The Raiders." Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, Headline , 1st UK, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 2nd Lord Ambrose title in an historical mystery series, based in 1830's England. Clean, like new.
Hardcover. NY, Bantam Books, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY DAVIDSON on the title page. This fifth culinary novel filled with 'five-star' recipes finds Caterer Goldy Schulz called on to prepare a banquet for a cosmetics company who induced animal rights protestors. Clean, like new.
Hardcover. NY, Mysterious Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Part of the Nicholas Barlow series. When his star author turns up dead and his million-dollar manuscript disappears, publisher Nicholas Barlow helps homicide detective Lt. Scanlon search for clues, with Nick's bedridden brother masterminding the investigation from Connecticut. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, Allison & Busby Limited, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY MARSTON on the title page. On the LNWR train a criminal is being escorted to his appointment with the hangman. But the wily Jeremy Oxley, con-man, thief and murderer, has one last ace up his sleeve: a ruthless accomplice willing to do anything to save her lover. Clean copy.
Softcover. Ashland OR, Blackstone Publishing, reprint, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wraps. Fletch's newfound son Jack has just heard from an old flame who's about to marry a billionaire's son -- that is until her future father-in-law suffers several near-fatal accidents. The potential victim -- the inventor of the perfect mirror, which allows people to see themselves exactly as others do -- lives in his own secluded compound, so Jack gets a job as pool hand on the estate to get closer to the action. Now Jack's life may be in danger, and he will need his inimitable father's help to discover -- before it's too late -- whose reflection hides a killer's heart.
Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A humorous mystery set in the hills of Tuscany. Clean copy.
NY, Grosset & Dunlap, reprint, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with light edgewear, Novel involving dope smuggling, one in which the NY State Police play an important role. Foreword by Gardner on a pathology expert to whom he is dedicating this book, 275 pages. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Doubleday & Company, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, black cloth covers with pink lettering on the front cover, the spine with white lettering. Tommy Hambledon's first postwar adventure and it leads him on a dangerous chase around London in a search for money and murderers. Bookplate on inside front cover otherwise clean, no markings.
Softcover. Norfolk VA, Crippen & Landru Publishers, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 249 pages. Best-known for her novels, Margaret Millar also wrote a handful of short stories, tales much admired by peers (including her husband Kenneth Millar, who used the pseudonym Ross Macdonald) but never collected in book form. Now Macdonald's biographer Tom Nolan has gathered and introduced those stories in this volume, which includes two all-but-unknown novellas from the 1940s. Here are half-a-dozen exhibits in evidence of the case made by English author and critic H.R.F. Keating, who judged: "No woman in twentieth-century American mystery writing is more important than Margaret Millar." Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A humorous spoof on the hard-boiled detective genre. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. Roslyn NY, Walter J. Black, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, illustrated boards. Three complete unabridged mysteries in one volume. Detective Book Club Edition. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright unclipped dust jacket. Phil Broker is reunited with his estranged Delta Force superace wife, Nina , in Langdon, North Dakota, where borderland security is ineffective in stopping a smuggling operation across the easily penetratable Canadian border. Into the story, Nina is taken hostage by a sociopath with a plan to wreak havoc upon a large portion of the U. S. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket with fading to spine and top edge of front panel. Entrusted to transport two prisoners to death row, Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux is wounded when one of them, Jimmie Lee Boggs, escapes, an act that causes Robicheaux to put all of his efforts into revenge.
Softcover. NY, Little, Brown & Company, reprint, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 238 pages. Originally published in paperback by Signet Books, December 1961. Deputy sheriff Tom Lord knows by now that far-west Texas is the place he'll always call home. He's spent too much time in the region's small towns to adapt to another place. And that's all right with him. What's not all right is being a deputy sheriff, where if it weren't for family misfortune, he might have been a doctor instead. Lord's got one ace-in-the-hole -- the land deed that makes him the biggest landowner in the county, just as the oil companies have started to move in. When Tom's approached by Aaron McBride of Highlands Oil and Gas with a contract to set up pipelines on his property, he's more than happy to sign on the dotted line with barely more than a cursory glance at the paperwork -- it just might be Lord's way out of a life he never wanted in the first place. But when Lord finds out just what that contract entailed, things start to go sour for Aaron McBride -- and fast. Because in this Texas town, Lord's the law -- and there's nothing more dangerous than a cop with nothing left to lose. Clean, unread copy.
Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket. Missionary Stew follows Draper Haere on a frenetic hunt to uncover the secret behind a right-wing coup in an named Central American country, and he hires Morgan Citron's investigative talents to help get to the bottom of things. Remainder stamp to bottom edge, otherwise a clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, William Morrow, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The fifth mystery featuring tough Boston PI Patrick Kenzie, his 'connected' partner Angie Gennaro and sometimes sidekick Bubba. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 2nd pr., 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 270 pages. The final Lew Archer mystery, in which the detective investigates a missing painting and uncovers buried secrets that echo the violence of the past. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Library of America , 4th pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 990 pages. James M. Cain's pioneering novel of murder and adultery along the California highway, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), shocked contemporaries with its laconic toughness and fierce sexuality. Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935) uses truncated rhythms and a unique narrative structure to turn its account of a Hollywood dance marathon into an unforgettable evocation of social chaos and personal desperation. In Thieves Like Us (1937), Edward Anderson vividly brings to life the dusty roads and back-country hideouts where a fugitive band of Oklahoma outlaws plays out its destiny. The Big Clock (1946), an ingenious novel of pursuit and evasion by the poet Kenneth Fearing, is set by contrast in the dense and neurotic inner world of a giant publishing corporation under the thumb of a warped and ultimately murderous chief executive. William Lindsay Gresham's controversial Nightmare Alley (1946), a ferocious psychological portrait of a charismatic carnival hustler, creates an unforgettable atmosphere of duplicity, corruption, and self-destruction. I Married a Dead Man (1948), a tale of switched identity set in the anxious suburbs, is perhaps the most striking novel of Cornell Woolrich, who found in the techniques of the gothic thriller the means to express an overpowering sense of personal doom. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 273 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR. Two private investigators--Bill Smith and Lydia Chin--investigate a construction site plagued by thieves and a murder, in a case that leads them into the darkest depths of the underworld.
Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1998, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Near Fine, Hardcover, 198 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Beautiful copy in clear mylar sleeve. Mystery novel featuring Victor Platz, sidekick of series character Charlie Bradshaw, who agrees to collect a suspicious suitcase in Montreal & winds up in a mess of trouble.
Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, September 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 218 pages. A very clean, tight copy in a bright dust jacket.
Hardcover. New York, New Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket, 383 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR ON FRONT ENDPAPER AND TITLE PAGE. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. New York, Random House , 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket, 372 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. New York, Random House, 1st, 1980, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Near Fine, Tan boards, black cloth spine with silver titles, red dust jacket with color illustration and acetate protective covering. Extremely slight wear to dust jacket, spine very stiff and tight, covers and pages crisp and unmarked; a very clean, tight copy in excellent condition.
Hardcover. UK, The Chicken House, 1st UK, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 348 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on half title page. First English translation of German mystery novel. Faint age toning to top and bottom text block edges. Scarce. A tight copy.
Hardcover. New York, Mysterious Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 216 pages. SIGNED BY CONSTANTINE. Lovely copy in clear mylar sleeve.
Hardcover. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. SIGNED BY BURKE on title-page. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.
Hardcover. NY, Delacorte, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. It's 9:00 A.M. in an unnamed Midwestern city. Bank Arbaugh and Mack Steiner have just come off a typical night shift--patrolling the city, scaring off prostitutes, shaking up the usual suspects. Sitting in Denny's, waiting for bacon and eggs, they get a call over the radio: A teenage girl is missing. With a glance, the two cops--best friends since childhood, as close as brothers-- know their lives have shifted off balance, because seven years before, Bank's own daughter went missing and has not been found to this day. Two parallel stories: two girls from opposite sides of town, seven years separating them. As evidence mounts, one case begins to illuminate the other, until finally, the inevitable conclusion is revealed. Craig Holden takes us on a harrowing journey into the night, and exposes not only the heart of a tattered American city, but also of two men whose lives are intertwined in loss, envy, and love.
Hardcover. NY, Armchair Detective Library, reprint , 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Pseudonym of Gore Vidal. 1st published in 1952. with a new introduction by him.
Hardcover. NY, Scribner's , 1st US, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Very good in a bright, unclipped dust jacket.. 270 pages.
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