Hard Case Crime

Stop This Man!

He Carried Death Everywhere He Went

SOME MEN AND SOME MERCHANDISE ARE JUST TOO HOT TO HANDLE All Tony Catell knew when he broke into the university science lab was that they had a gold ingot on the premises for some sort of experiment. So he stole it. What he didn’t know was that the experiment involved nuclear power—and that the gold was dangerously radioactive. Now the cops and the FBI are on Tony’s trail, Tony’s underworld contacts don’t want anything to do with him, and the loot he’s lugging around is leaving a swath of radiation sickness and death in his path. And since he’s just come from his third stint in prison, if they catch him, he’s not going back to jail—he’s going to the electric chair…

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Passport To Peril

On the run —- behind the Iron Curtain!

From the corridors and compartments of the Orient Express to the shadowy, ruined streets of Budapest—which he saw firsthand as a foreign correspondent during World War II—Parker takes you on a nightmare tour of a land where life is cheap, old hatreds run strong, and a couple of Americans can find themselves in more danger than they ever imagined. With all the immediacy of the wartime dispatches Parker filed from Turkey, Danzig, Warsaw, and Bucharest and all the authority of a man who himself spent three years crossing borders without a passport and narrowly avoiding arrest by the Gestapo, PASSPORT TO PERIL paints a heart-stopping picture of desperate men in a desperate time.

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Fake I.D.

How Far Would You Go To Get What You Want?

A New York bar bouncer with dreams of being more, Tommy Russo jumps at the chance to join a horse-owning syndicate. But to do so he’ll have to pony up $10,000—and that’s money he hasn’t got. So what’s an ambitious young man to do? Anything he has to…

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Casino Moon

Where All The Punches Are Below The Belt

THE ONLY THING HARDER THAN GETTING INTO THE MOB… IS GETTING OUT. For Anthony Russo, an Atlantic City mobster’s son, the chances of escaping a life of crime are slim. They hinge on his plan to back a washed-up boxer’s comeback bid, and that, in turn, hinges on winning the help of a sexy round card girl who’s gone toe-to-toe with the current champion—in the bedroom…

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House Dick

What Goes On Behind Closed Doors At A Washington D.C. Hotel?

HOUSE DICK is one of Hunt’s very best, a classic hardboiled story of a detective in a Washington D.C. hotel (no, not that hotel) investigating a twisty tale of burglary and murder, of skullduggery under cover of darkness, of deception and shifting loyalties—and of the price you pay when you trust the wrong people…

The author was convicted of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping, eventually serving 33 months in prison as part of the Watergate affair.
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The Cutie

There are many ways to sell yourself.

SOME PEOPLE WILL DO ANYTHING FOR MONEY Mavis St. Paul had been a rich man’s mistress. Now she was a corpse. And every cop in New York City was hunting for the two-bit punk accused of putting a knife in her. But the punk was innocent. He’d been set up to take the fall by some cutie who was too clever by half. My job? Find that cutie—before the cutie found me.

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Dead Man’s Brother

It Would Take More Than Luck To Find The Vatican’s Missing Millions—In The Jungles Of Brazil…

Once an art smuggler, now a respectable art dealer, Ovid Wiley awoke to find his former partner stabbed to death on his gallery floor. That was strange enough—but when a CIA agent showed up to spring him from NYPD custody, things got a lot stranger. Now the CIA is offering to clear up the murder charge, but only in return for a favor: They want Ovid to fly to Vatican City and trace the trail of a renegade priest who has gone missing with millions in church funds. What’s the connection? The priest’s lover, a woman Ovid knew in his smuggling days…

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Killing Castro

Some Lust For Power—Others, For Retribution…

BECAUSE IN 1961, NO ONE WOULD HAVE CALLED FIDEL CASTRO THE RETIRING TYPE There were five of them, each prepared to kill, each with his own reasons for accepting what might well be a suicide mission. The pay? $20,000 apiece. The mission? Find a way into Cuba and kill Castro. This breathtaking thriller, originally published the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis under a pen name Lawrence Block never used before or since, is the rarest of Block’s books

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50-To-One

When it came to crime, she wrote the book.

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF HARD CASE CRIME! Okay, not really. But what if, instead of having been founded 50 books ago, Hard Case Crime had been founded 50 years ago, by a rascal out to make a quick buck off the popularity of pulp fiction? Such a fellow might make a few enemies—especially after publishing a supposed non-fiction account of a heist at a Mob-run nightclub, actually penned by an 18-year-old showgirl. With both the cops and the crooks after them, our heroes are about to learn that reading and writing pulp novels is a lot more fun than living them…
Told in 50 chapters, each chapter named after one of the first 50 books in the series.

Gloriously meta-pulp via Hard Case Crime.

Gun Work

Make Sure You Choose The Right Weapon For The Job

POINT AND SHOOT. Life isn’t always cheap south of the border—some lives are worth a million dollars. That’s what the Mexican kidnapping cartel was demanding for Carl Ledbetter’s wife. So Carl reached out to the one person he knew with a chance in hell of saving her, a deadly man whose own life he’d saved in the sands of Iraq. It was time to call in some favors. Because some situations call for negotiation, but some…call for gun work.

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The First Quarry

Killing is a young man’s game.

For the first time ever, the best-selling author of ROAD TO PERDITION takes us back to the beginning, revealing the never-before-told story of Quarry’s first job: infiltrating a college town and eliminating a professor whose affair with one of his beautiful, young students is the least of his sins…

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The Max

Caged… and Dangerous!

When last we saw Max Fisher and Angela Petrakos, Max was being arrested by the NYPD for drug trafficking and Angela was fleeing the country in the wake of a brutal murder. Now both are headed for eye-opening encounters with the law—Max in the cell blocks of Attica, Angela in a quaint little prison on the Greek island of Lesbos…

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Baby Moll

No man escapes the sins of his past.

Six years after quitting the Florida Mob, Peter Mallory is about to be dragged back in. Stalked by a vicious killer and losing his hold on power, Mallory’s old boss needs help—the kind of help only a man like Mallory can provide. But behind the walls of the fenced-in island compound he once called home, Mallory is about to find himself surrounded by beautiful women, by temptation, and by danger—and one wrong step could trigger a bloodbath…

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No House Limit

They backed the world’s greatest gambler to bring down an honest man.

Joe Martin ran the biggest independent casino on the Las Vegas strip—and the Syndicate wanted him out. So they brought in Bello, the most famous gambler in the world, to challenge Joe to a marathon craps game. The stakes: everything Joe owns…

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Somebody Owes Me Money

Even a New York cabbie can get taken for a ride…

SOMETIMES WINNING FEELS AN AWFUL LOT LIKE LOSING. Cab driver Chet Conway was hoping for a good tip from his latest fare, the sort he could spend. But what he got was a tip on a horse race. Which might have turned out okay, except that when he went to collect his winnings Chet found his bookie lying dead on the living room floor. Chet knows he had nothing to do with it—but just try explaining that to the cops, to the two rival criminal gangs who each think Chet’s working for the other, and to the dead man’s beautiful sister, who has flown in from Las Vegas to avenge her brother’s murder…

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