When a hit man takes a sabbatical to focus on love, his bosses aren't happy in an award-winning debut novel that earns comparison to Paul Auster and Kafka. When the anonymous narrator botches an assignment from the clandestine organization that employs him, everyone in his life becomes a participant in his punishment. In the end, he is called out of retirement for a final assignment: to seek and identify his own assassin.

Essays on American writers whose lives and careers span the history of hard-boiled writing, from its birth in American pulp magazines of the 1920s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Characteristic of this writing is an objective viewpoint, impersonal tone, violent action, colloquial speech, touch characters and understated style, usually but not limited to detective or crime fiction.

"On the 12th floor of the Acme Building, on a cold February day in St. Paul, Guy Noir looks down the barrel of a loaded revolver in the hands of geezer gangster Joey Roast Beef who is demanding to hear what lucrative scheme Guy is cooking up with stripper-turned-women's-studies-professor Naomi Fallopian. Everyone wants to know-Joey, Lieutenant McCafferty, reporter Gene Williker, Guy's ex-girlfriend Sugar O'Toole, the despicable Larry B. Larry, the...

Driver thinks he has settled into a normal life, but after his fiancée is killed he must confront his criminal past.

On a night flight from London to Boston, Ted Severson meets Lily Kintner. Sharing one too many martinis, the strangers begin to play a game of truth, revealing very intimate details about themselves. Ted talks about his marriage that's going stale and that he's sure his wife Miranda is cheating on him. But Lily has a dark history that she's not sharing...and soon sex and deception lead to murder.

There was always something slightly dangerous about Joan. So, when she turns up at private investigator Henry Kimball's office asking him to investigate her husband, he can't help feeling ill at ease. Just the sight of her stirs up a chilling memory: he knew Joan in his previous life as a high school English teacher, when he was at the center of a tragedy. Now Joan needs his help in proving that her husband is cheating. But what should be a simple...

Terry Rand, cut free from his family after his older brother, Collie, went on a senseless killing spree, returns home to piece together the day his brother turned rabid, delving into a blood history that reveals the Rand family tree is rotten to the roots, and the secrets his ancestors buried are now coming furious and vengeful to the surface.

In the tradition of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, Plugged tells the story of Daniel McEvoy, an Irish bouncer at a seedy New Jersey club. Daniel has a problem. Well, he has several, but the worst is that the girl he loves was just murdered. Then more people around him start dying—and not of natural causes. Suddenly Daniel's got the mob, cops, and an unstable lovesick neighbor after him, and the only clue points towards the crooked doctor...

When Irish bouncer Dan McEvoy's step-gran shows up on the hunt for his dishevelled aunt Evelyn, it quickly becomes clear that -- despite the New Jersey mob -- family can provide the deadliest threat of all. In a city of gun-happy criminals, bent cops and a tough-talking woman detective who inspires terror and lust in equal measure, Dan may just have reached the point where sharp wit won't cut the mustard. But can he play the heavies at their own game?...