Portrait in BLOOD They were the New York art scene’s golden couple — until the day Amanda Oliver was found murdered in her SoHo loft, and her husband Philip confessed to shooting her. But was he a continent away when the trigger was pulled? Art dealer Jackson Wyeth sets out to learn the truth, and uncovers the dangerous secrets lurking beneath the surface of Manhattan’s posh galleries and decadent parties, a world of adultery and madness, of beautiful girls growing up too fast and men making fortunes and losing their minds. But even the worst the art world can imagine will seem tame when the final shattering sin is revealed...

QUENTIN TARANTINO on NOBODY'S ANGEL: “My favorite fiction novel this year was written by a taxi driver who used to hand it out to his passengers. It’s a terrific story and character study of a cabbie in Chicago during a time when a serial killer is robbing and murdering cabbies. Kudos to Hard Case Crime for publishing Mr. Clark’s book.” TWO KILLERS STALK THE STREETS OF CHICAGO—CAN ONE TAXI DRIVER CORNER THEM BOTH? Eddie Miles is one of a dying breed: a Windy City hack who knows every street and back alley of his beloved city and takes its recent descent into violence personally. But what can one driver do about a killer targeting streetwalkers or another terrorizing cabbies? Precious little—until the night he witnesses one of them in action...

This is the first book to offer a critical analysis of one variant of the mystery story or novel—the use of a physician as the major detective. There is little difference between a medical “case study” and a mystery story. The book reviews the works of major authors, from R. Austin Freeman, Helen McCloy, Josephine Bell, and H.C. Bailey, to Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs, Aaron Elkins, and Colin Cotterill, with briefer reviews of minor authors. It also addresses historical (fictional) physician detectives, psychological detectives, and physician detective nonfiction. Physicians and health workers are avid readers of detective fiction and will welcome this volume, which addresses their specific interests. Its critical analysis of books that have long been viewed as central to detective fiction will also appeal to fans of the mystery story.

TWO OF THE GREATEST AUTHORS OF NOIR FICTION IN AN UNFORGETTABLE COLLABORATION An innocent woman lies dead in the street, felled by a stray bullet. Now it’s up to the woman who killed her to investigate the dead woman’s life and pick up its cut-short threads, carrying out a mission of vengeance on her behalf against the man she loved and lost – and the nightclub-singing femme fatale responsible for splitting them apart. Begun in the last years of his life by noir master Cornell Woolrich, the haunted genius responsible for such classics as Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, and Phantom Lady, and completed decades later by acclaimed novelist and MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block (A Walk Among the Tombstones, Eight Million Ways to Die), INTO THE NIGHT – available here for the first time in more than 35 years – is a collaboration that extends beyond the grave, echoing the book’s own story of the living taking on and completing the unfinished work of the dead.

A disgraced LA music star faces execution for a crime he didn't commit in the long-lost crime novel of Robert Silverberg, SFF Writers of America Grand Master, available for the first time in over 60 years. HAD L.A.’S HOTTEST BANDLEADER BECOME AN INSTRUMENT OF DEATH? Before his extraordinary career as a grandmaster of science fiction, Robert Silverberg honed his craft as a writer for a variety of pulp magazines, including crime digests with titles like Trapped and Guilty Detective Story Magazine. He also wrote this long-lost novel, which appeared under the pen name “Stan Vincent” in 1960 – and has never been published since. Meet Bob McKay: once a rising star in the toniest nightclubs of Los Angeles, now a down-and-out denizen of tawdry bars where B-girls hustle drinks and brawls break out nightly. When one hustler winds up strangled, McKay lands on Death Row. Can a starlet and a sympathetic newspaper columnist clear his name before his date with the death chamber? Featuring a new introduction by the author and three bonus stories from Guilty and Trapped, THE HOT BEAT offers readers a trip through time back to the pulp era, when a future star was making his bones with stories of murder, betrayal, and dangerous desires…

Connolly investigates the realities of sin through reflection on different biblical and literary texts. Writers as varied as Sophocles, Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Irvine Welsh help illuminate different models of sin. Physical evil, law and morality, alienation and existence, power and money, spiritual love and failure are some of the ever-compelling themes that are scrutinized. In Dostoevsky's novels, sin is the rejection of life and love and a refusal to commit oneself to destiny. This book rediscovers a truly relational understanding of sin and moves toward a more adult conception of the mystery of sin and forgiveness.

From the world-famous creator of "Perry Mason," Erle Stanley Gardner comes another baffling case for the Cool & Lam detective agency. HBO series Perry Mason airs June 2020 starring Matthew Rhys in the titular role. Erle Stanley Gardner was not just the creator of PERRY MASON - at the time of his death, he was the best-selling American author of all time, with hundreds of millions of books in print, including the 29 cases of the brash, irresistible detective team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. Gardner was also one of the most ingenious plot-spinners in the field, coming up with stunning twists and reveals... and THE COUNT OF 9 is Gardner at his twistiest. Hired to protect the treasures of a globe-trotting adventurer, Bertha and Donald confront an impossible crime: how could anything be smuggled out of a dinner party - least of all a 6-foot-long blowgun - when the guests were X-rayed coming and going? But that's nothing compared to the crime they face next: AN IMPOSSIBLE MURDER...

JAILED FOR A JOKE It isn't easy going to jail for a practical joke. Of course, this particular joke left 20 cars wrecked on the highway and two politicians' careers in tatters - so jail is where Harold Künt landed. Now he's just trying to keep a low profile in the Big House. He wants no part of his fellow inmates' plan to use an escape tunnel to rob two banks. But it's too late; he's in it up to his neck. And that neck may just wind up in a noose... HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER is Donald E. Westlake at his funniest and his most ingenious, a rediscovered crime classic from the MWA Grand Master returning to stores for the first time in three decades.

ON THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF PROHIBITION, LEARN WHAT REALLY HAPPENED. In 1919, the National Prohibition Act was passed, making it illegal across America to produce, distribute, or sell liquor. With this act, the U.S. Congress also created organized crime as we know it. Italian, Jewish, and Irish mobs sprang up to supply the suddenly illegal commodity to the millions of people still eager to drink it. Men like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz and Bugsy Siegel, Al Capone in Chicago and Nucky Johnson in Atlantic City, waged a brutal war for power in the streets and on the waterfronts. But if you think you already know this story...think again, since you've never seen it through the eyes of one of the mobsters who lived it. Called "one of the most significant organized crime figures in the United States" by the U.S. District Attorney, Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo was just 15 years old when Prohibition became law. Over the next decade, Alo would work side by side with Lansky and Luciano as they navigated the brutal underworld of bootlegging, thievery and murder. Alo's later career included prison time and the ultimate Mob tribute: being immortalized as "Johnny Ola" in The Godfather, Part II. Introduced to the 91-year-old Alo living in retirement in Florida, Dylan Struzan based this book on more than 50 hours of recorded testimony--stories Alo had never shared, and that he forbid her to publish until "after I'm gone." Alo died, peacefully, two months short of his 97th birthday. And now his stories--bracing and violent, full of intrigue and betrayal, hunger and hubris--can finally be told.

An examination of the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, beginning with her early poetry and moving through her fiction to her dramas, essays and lectures. It illustrates how Sayers used popular genres to teach about sin and redemption, and how she redefined the seven deadly sins for the 20th century.