There, he hooks up with the Vicksburg Kid, who completes his con education. Together they form a formidable duo, playing for the highest stakes in the Unhappy Virgin Game.

    In this book, Ernest Larsen examines the film's sophistcated narrative structure and the new spin it puts on an old genre.

    But another survivor is now out of prison, looking for reparation in any form he can find it.The Turnaround takes us on a journey from the rock-and-soul streets of the '70s to the changing neighborhoods of D.C. today, from the diners and auto garages of the city to the inside of Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, where wounded men and women have returned to the world in a time of war. A novel of fathers and sons, wives and husbands, loss, victory and violent redemption, The Turnaround is another compelling, highly charged novel from George Pelecanos, "the best crime novelist in America."

    Played out in the underground worlds of high-stakes gambling, publishing, and the film industry, this epic thriller follows two brothers, Merlyn and Arite, as they delve into the dangerous underbelly of American life. From Las Vegas to New York to Hollywood, there is one thing that remains constant: organized crime and the law are simply two sides of the same coin...

    Screenplay for the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

    The Given Day tells the story of two families—one black, one white—swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power.Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era—Babe Ruth; Eugene O'Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's ruthless Red-chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time—including the Spanish Influenza pandemic—and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives.

    His riskiest feat, however, was witnessing a Dixie-style mob execution while atop his diving platform. Robert Taylor saw the hit also. A blues-loving Detroit hustler touring the Southland in a black Jaguar, Taylor's got his own secret agenda re the "Cornbread Cosa Nostra," and he wants Dennis in on the game. But there's a lot more in Robert Taylor's pocket than a photo of his lynched great-grandfather. And high-diver Dennis could be about to take a long, fatal fall -- right into a mess of hoop skirts, Civil War play-acting ... and more trouble than he ever dreamed possible.

    Hunting killers, rousting whores, quelling gang wars, fighting corruption, they risk death every day...every night. They are the Los Angeles blues - a new breed of cop.

    Now he's a drifter, on the run after escaping from a mental institution. One afternoon he meets Fay, a beautiful young widow. She is smart and decent -- at least when she's sober. Soon Collins finds himself involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes drastically wrong almost before it even begins. Because the kid they've picked up isn't like other kids: he's diabetic and without insulin, he'll die. Not the safest situation for Collins, a man for whom stress and violence have long gone hand-in-hand.

    A wildly funny, irreverent tale of murder, mayhem, and the mob.When up-and-coming chef Tommy Pagana settles for a less than glamorous stint at his uncle's restaurant in Manhattan's Little Italy, he unwittingly finds himself a partner in big-time crime. And when the mob decides to use the kitchen for a murder, nothing Tommy learned in cooking school has prepared him for what happens next.With the FBI on one side, and his eccentric wise-guy superiors on the other, Tommy has to struggle to do right by his conscience, and to avoid getting killed in the meantime.In the vein of Prizzi's Honor, Bone in the Throat is a thrilling Mafia caper laced with entertaining characters and wry humor. This first novel is a must-have for fans of Anthony Bourdain's nonfiction.

    In his most dazzling novel since the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and arms dealer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents.A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart, Stone’s Fall is a quest to discover how and why John Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home.Chronologically, it moves backwards–from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890, and finally to Venice in 1867– and in the process the quest to uncover the truth plays out against the backdrop of the evolution of high-stakes international finance, Europe’s first great age of espionage, and the start of the twentieth century’s arms race.Like Fingerpost, Stone’s Fall is an intricately plotted and richly satisfying puzzle–an erudite work of history and fiction that feels utterly true and oddly timely–and marks the triumphant return of one of the world’s great storytellers.

    Now another misguided mastermind is giving it yours. But don’t feel bad, you’re not alone…. On the eve of perestroika, Alex Ferris stumbles onto KGB General Karpov’s scheme to regain Russia’s superpower status while investigating his brother’s death. After surviving attempts on his life and assembling bizarre clues, Alex settles on a most unusual suspect only to discover that Elaine is a victim herself. Unseen masters are forcing her into traitorous acts through nefarious threats. How many silent slaves like Elaine are out there? What do her tormenters want? Can he stop them? Alex flies from San Francisco to Siberia to find those answers and avenge his brother. In the midst of that frozen landscape and those tumultuous times, he survives infiltration, interrogation, and romance only to learn that he too is being manipulated as part of a much grander scheme. Written by a former Green Beret and counterintelligence specialist with a decade of experience on the ground in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

    Now she's dead - her body dredged up from the Sabine River, bound with wire and weighted down. Her best friend, Sue Ellen, wants to take her ashes to Hollywood. But May Lynn's diary holds a secret: the location of a large sum of money.

    The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia—and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia—driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches—into a region of total madness.

    There are many unresolved questions. Why, for instance, have both victims left their fortunes to an orphanage run by the English Lady Astair? And who is the beautiful "A.B.," whose signed photograph is found in the apparent suicide's apartment? Relying on his keen intuition, the eager sleuth plunges into an investigation that leads him across Europe, landing him at the deadly center of a terrorist conspiracy of worldwide proportions.