Here, in Stout’s first two complete Wolfe mysteries, the arrogant, gourmandizing, sedentary sleuth and his trusty man-about-town Archie Goodwin solve their most baffling cases.Fer-de-lanceThe fer-de-lance is among the most deadly snakes known to man. When someone makes a present of one to Nero Wolfe, his partner, Archie Goodwin, suspects it means Wolfe is getting close to solving the devilishly clever murders of an immigrant and a college president. But this is a case with more twists than an angry rattler...and if Wolfe doesn’t handle it with extreme care, he’ll be the next one struck by a killer with poison in his heart.The League of Frightened MenPaul Chapin’s Harvard cronies never forgave themselves for the hazing prank that left their friend a cripple. Yet they believed that Paul himself had forgiven them—until a class reunion ends in death and a series of poems promising more of the same. Now this league of frightened men is desperate for Nero Wolfe’s help. But can even the great detective outwit a killer smart enough to commit an unseen murder…in plain sight?

    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...

    At the job she encounters two men who take an interest in her, a handsome young schemer who makes her blood race and a wealthy but unwell older man who rewards her for her attentions with a $50,000 tip and an unconventional offer of marriage...

    Imprisoned for mass-murder, he escapes with the help of two strange men and a mysterious benefactor. Unfortunately for Drake, they don’t just want a piece of the action. They want it all. Gift Horse: Mutilated by rival convicts, Marco Vance is brought back from the brink of death. Outfitted with the latest cybernetic enhancements, he returns to the Regional Atlanta Metroplex as the conquering criminal kingpin. But, his savior demands that he deliver a message to repay his debt. A message that no one will forget.Money Is Everything: Street gangs hunt a deposed crime boss carrying a case of cash. Pursued and friendless, he can trust no one. Except someone he can buy. Luckily, Noose the genetically engineered dwarf mercenary is always for hire. But, what is his price?Total length about 15,000 words.Includes a free 8000 word excerpt of the full-length novel DEAD DWARVES DON'T DANCE.

    This collection, the first of a two-volume omnibus, presents four classics of the 1940s overdue for fresh attention. Anticipating the “domestic suspense” novels of recent years, these four gripping tales explore the terrors of the mind and of family life, of split personality and conflicted sexual identity.Vera Caspary’s Laura (1943) begins with the investigation into a young woman’s murder and blossoms into a complex study, told from multiple viewpoints, of the pressures confronted by a career woman seeking to lead an independent life. Source of the celebrated film by Otto Preminger, Caspary’s novel has depths and surprises of its own. As much a novel of manners as of mystery, it remains a superb evocation of a vanished Manhattan.Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man (1946) won an Edgar Award for best first novel and continues to fascinate as a singular mixture of detection, satire, and psychological portraiture. A poet on the faculty of an Ivy League school (modeled on Eustis’s alma mater, Smith College) is found murdered, setting off ripple effects of anxiety, suspicion, and panic in the hothouse atmosphere of an English department rife with talk of Freud and Kafka.With In a Lonely Place (1947), Dorothy B. Hughes created one of the first full-scale literary portraits of a serial murderer. The streets of Los Angeles become a setting for random killings, and Hughes ventures, with unblinking exactness, into the mind of the killer. In the process she conjures up a potent mood of postwar dread and lingering trauma.Raymond Chandler called Elisabeth Sanxay Holding “the top suspense writer of them all.” In The Blank Wall (1947) she constructs a ferociously taut drama around the plight of a wartime housewife forced beyond the limits of her sheltered domestic world in order to protect her family. The barely perceptible constraints of an ordinary suburban life become a course of obstacles that she must dodge with the determination of a spy or criminal.Psychologically subtle, socially observant, and breathlessly suspenseful, these four spellbinding novels recapture a crucial strain of American crime writing.

    Gabriel's Home for Boys. There, he picked up a few key survival skills; a wee bit of an anger management problem; and his best friend for life, Junior. Now adults, Boo and Junior have a combined weight of 470 pounds (mostly Boo's), about ten grand in tattoos (mostly Junior's), and a talent for wisecracking banter. Together, they provide security for The Cellar, a Boston nightclub where the bartender Audrey doles out hugs and scoldings for her favorite misfits, and the night porter, Luke, expects them to watch their language. At last Boo has found a family.But when Boo and Junior are hired to find Cassandra, a well-to-do runaway slumming among the authority-shy street kids, Boo sees in the girl his own long-lost younger sister. And as the case deepens with evidence that Cassie is being sexually exploited, Boo's blind desire for justice begins to push his surrogate family's loyalty to the breaking point. Cassie's life depends on Boo's determination to see the case through, but that same determination just might finally drive him and Junior apart. What's looking like an easy payday is turning into a hard bounce--for everyone.

    The worst was bad enough to get him fired - but the best landed him a new job, penning lurid articles for Real Detective magazine, one of the last of the true-crime pulps. Only the case they've got him working on, involving a beauty pageant contestant found dead on an Atlantic City beach, is one some very powerful men would rather see covered up than covered. And if Adam keeps digging, he may find he's digging his own grave...

    In the sports world, Billie Jean King is breaking gender barriers on the tennis court. Janet Guthrie doesn’t consider herself a “women’s libber,” but to racing’s good ol’ boys, she’s a threat. When Guthrie makes a bid for Indy in 1976, the other drivers slam her mercilessly, even suggesting she’s really a man. Fans heckle her, hoping she’ll crash. Guthrie smiles through the pain and qualifies for Indy in 1978. And even a broken wrist and a rift on her team can’t derail her—she finishes in the top ten.Bestselling author Stephan Talty’s riveting biography brings Guthrie’s passion and persistence vividly to life. With gripping realism, Speed Girl immerses readers in the untold story of the woman who came to Indy a racer and left a trailblazer.

    It’s a private ticket into a secret world of desire and sex and the raw edge between them . . . I read it with the fever of the addicted.”—Michael Connelly“I never miss a book by Vicki Hendricks. No one on the current scene is writing super-charged, erotic, real noir novels like these.”—George P. PelecanosRenata is young, beautiful, and has sex for money and kicks. Few are immune to her intoxicating allure—even her pet Burmese python, Pepe, seems captive to her charm. Richard is one of her clients, a poetry professor with a wife and two sons, whose erotic fascination with Rennie is threatening his home and job.Meanwhile, Julie, a shy wannabe novelist, spies on Rennie from her room next door in between bouts of frustrated writing. Both would do anything to save Rennie from her dangerous occupation and become her one true love.Set in Miami’s gaudy vacationland and the haunting atmosphere of the Everglades, Cruel Poetry is a gripping story of fatal attraction that captures the Florida behind the postcards. As the lives of Richard and Julie unravel amidst drugs and murder, Hendricks amps the adrenaline jolts and sweeps us to a bittersweet climax.Vicki Hendricks lives in Hollywood, Florida, where she teaches English and creative writing. A fan of dangerous sports, she has completed 550 skydives, learned to dog sled in Finland, and has been birding in the jungles of Costa Rica.

    He buys his suits in Beverly Hills and wins his cases in court. But one day he's approached by a friend to handle the split with his wife. That's the day things start to go very wrong for Andrew Chamberlain . . . up to and including murder."James Scott Bell is at his best in One More Lie. Fast paced, this novella will leave you breathless to the unforeseen end. Once I started reading, I couldn't put it down. Novel Rocket and I give it our highest recommendation. It's a must read!"Ane Mulligan, V. P./Sr. EditorNovel RocketPLUS, three stories full of the suspense twists James Scott Bell is known for:"A Great Man" - The Reverend Mike Rickland was not expecting one of New Jersey's most notorious mobsters to pay him a visit. All Angelo Scapelli wanted was to offer Mike's church ten million dollars. On one condition."Some Hero" - Garth Himmelfarb, middle aged and paunchy, was only trying to work off a few pounds by jogging in his neighborhood. He didn't expect to help a woman in distress, a beautiful woman, a woman he could be a hero for. He didn't expect to step in to a situation that could get him beaten up or killed. But he did."How to Make Living as a Freelance Writer" - A struggling author, once popular, now on the way out, comes up with a last attempt to make enough money to live on as a writer . . . . and actually finds it. Let's just say it's not the "traditional" route."James Scott Bell is a master storyteller. In a few short words he can make you care about a character, cause you to wave your hands in warning as they speed toward disaster, or root for them to win the day." - Susan May Warren, bestselling authorJames Scott Bell is the #1 bestselling author of Plot & Structure (Writer's Digest Books) and numerous novels and stories of suspense. Among these are Watch Your Back and Try Dying. Writing as K. Bennett he is also the author of the zombie legal thriller Pay Me in Flesh.

    He's escaped from a mental hospital up north and hitchhiked his way south, the voice of his dead brother urging him on. But when Charlie hits Memphis, the fine line between his delusions and reality shift in the form of the Reverend Phineas Childe-a preacher bent on booze and women; a Man of God with a dark agenda. Charlie is the perfect pawn in the Reverend's game of retribution. And the small North Mississippi town of Cuba Landing will be the setting for the Reverend's very personal Apocalypse. . . .

    It begins with a beautiful woman dead, murdered—Vassilia Caroline Baird, known to all simply as V. That’s where this extraordinary novel begins. But the story it tells begins years earlier, on a struggling farm in the shadow of the Great Depression and among the brawling "cat skinners" of Southern California, driving graders and bulldozers to tame the American West. And the story that unfolds, in the masterful hands of acclaimed author Oakley Hall, is a lyrical outpouring of hunger and grief, of jealousy and corruption, of raw sexual yearning and the tragedy of the destroyed lives it leaves in its wake. Unpublished for more than half a century, SO MANY DOORS is Hall’s masterpiece, an excoriating vision of human nature at its most brutal, and one of the most powerful books you will ever read.

    But is Bedelia too good to be true? A mysterious new neighbor turns out to be a detective on the trail of a “kitten with claws of steel”—a picture-perfect wife with a string of dead husbands in her wake.Caspary builds this tale to a peak of psychological suspense as her characters are trapped together by a blizzard. The true Bedelia, the woman who chose murder over a life on the street, reveals how she turns male fantasies of superiority into a deadly con.Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. Enjoy the series: Bedelia; The Blackbirder; Bunny Lake Is Missing; By Cecile; The G-String Murders; The Girls in 3-B; In a Lonely Place; Laura; Mother Finds a Body; Now, Voyager; Skyscraper; Stranger on Lesbos; Women's Barracks.

    AFTER 16 YEARS ON THE RUN,  WOULD NOLAN BURY THE HATCHET WITH THE MOB… OR WOULD THEY BURY HIM FIRST?They don’t come tougher than Nolan – but even a hardened professional thief can’t fight off the entire Chicago mafia.  So when an old friend offers to broker a truce, Nolan accepts the terms.  All he has to do is pull off one last heist – and trust the Mob not to double cross him.Fortunately, Nolan has a couple of things going for him: an uncanny knack for survival and an unmatched hunger for revenge…Books #1 and #2 in the Nolan series

    Marcus Reznick watched the love of his life blow her brains out and then dove to the bottom of a bottle of vodka. Now he's living in Riverside Mobile Home Park and trying to pull his life together...until a powerful temptation comes his way. Steve Regent is an internet pornographer who has moved to Riverside Mobile Home Park to work on a new website-Trailer Park Girls. He's looking for beautiful women...but instead, he finds something very ugly. Sherry Manning is a drug addict living in the trailer park with her boyfriend, Andy Winchell, who's a dealer. When a friend of a friend ODs in their trailer and turns out to be the son of a powerful politician, the truth about his death is covered up in the media. But Sherry and Andy know that truth...and she fears what might be done to silence them. Anna Dunfy is trying to make ends meet by doing temp jobs and stripping at night to support her mentally handicapped daughter, Kendra...an astonishingly beautiful girl with a woman's body, a child's mind, and a dangerous urge to do something naughty. It's a run-down little trailer park in northern California, but it could be anywhere in the United States. It is unassuming, unremarkable and looks like a million other trailer parks. But don't let the sleepy appearance fool you. It's a nest of dark secrets, boiling lusts and murder waiting to happen.