Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner.  She wants Burke to find a monster for her—so she can kill him with her bare hands.In this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegade investigator teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements.  Fearfully knowing, crackling with narrative tension, and written in prose as forceful as a hollow-point slug, Flood is Burke at his deadliest—and Vachss at the peak of his form.

    There were no cell phones and no computers. Entertainment was found in other forms and activities and Travis McGee lived and roamed freely on the edges of that era and made us all wish we had more adventure in our lives. I bought this volume because the Travis McGee novels qualify to me as worth keeping around and re-reading on a rainy day, a snowy day, a home sick in bed with the flu day, or just any day when you need to escape to another place and another time and be entertained by one of the best loved characters, even if from another era and one that few under 30 have heard of. I did not have the pleasure to buy the leather bound Grand Masters copy of this book. My copy is one of the book store copies. Well worth getting and reading. But all of John D. McDonalds books are. /BEST VALUE ON THIS GIFT QUALITY BOOK /FAST SHIPPING/OUTSTANDING CUSTOMER SERVICE/

    Cain is the third member of the trio who had such enormous influence, not only on the writing of detective fiction, on film and the way America was viewed. Like Chandler and Hammett, Cain wrote about crime, but unlike them he wrote from teh point of view of the criminal and with a sense of bitter, even savage realism which is entirely his own.

    

    This is a fun knock off of the hardboiled persuasion, and Mac Slade is a Hardboiled PI who is having a hard day. Great hardboiled parody, very hard to find.

    

    In a title for a story he never wrote, he captured the essence of his tortured world: “First you dream, then you die.”Introducing these 13 tales, Nevins de­scribes the dark world Woolrich so viv­idly creates. “The dominant reality in his world is the Depression, and Woolrich has no peers when it comes to describing a frightened little guy in a tiny apartment with no money, no job, a hun­gry wife and children, and anxiety eating him like a cancer. If a Woolrich protago­nist is in love, the beloved is likely to vanish in such a way that he not only can’t find her but can’t convince anyone she ever existed.”ContentsDeath sits in the dentist's chair --Walls that hear you --Preview of death --Murder in wax --The body upstairs --Kiss of the cobra --Red liberty --Dark melody of madness --The corpse and the kid --Dead on her feet --The death of me --The showboat murders --Hot water.