Our narrator must piece together the history of his blighted existence and discover the agents of its cruel end. What he doesn’t expect is that digging for the truth will demand plenty of lying.

    Robert Forester, a depressed but fundamentally decent man, liked to watch Jenny through her kitchen window, a harmless palliative, as he saw it, to his lonely life and failed marriage. As he is drawn into her life, however, the recriminations of his simple pleasure shatter the deceptive calm of this small Pennsylvania town. With striking clarity and horrible inevitability, Forester is caught up in a series of deaths in which he is the innocent bystander, presumed guilty. Highsmith has once again, as Graham Greene wrote "created a world of her own, a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger". And that sense of danger grows from the first page to the sinister and chilling conclusion.

    Merciless in its suspense, flawless in its grasp of the ways in which ordinary people hurtle over the edge, The Hot Spot is a superb example of fifties roman noir.

    Frank's car was found at the bottom of a cliff, with him inside. Jack thinks that Frank's death is suspicious, so he decides to talk to a few people. Frank was a mild man and did as he was told, but Jack's not a bit like that.

    The classic novel of sexual obsession and murder amid the star-making machinery of Hollywood in the 1950s."She was as white as marble, but she looked lovely.  Her hair was splayed out in fine strands of gold, and her lips were bright, rich red, and there was a green eyeshadow on her eyelids.  You could see that because her eyes were closed and she was lying very still.  She was lying still and she wasn't breathing."With its portraits of washed-up directors, jaded leading men, and a ruthless cop whose one-track mind leads straight to a cyanide pellet, I Wake Up Screaming is a magnificent thriller by a Hollywood insider whose screenplays included Lady in the Lake and I, Mobster.

    On the same day that Roy Cady is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he senses that his boss, a dangerous loan-sharking bar-owner, wants him dead. Known “without affection” to members of the boss’s crew as “Big Country” on account of his long hair, beard, and cowboy boots, Roy is alert to the possibility that a routine assignment could be a deathtrap. Which it is. Yet what the would-be killers do to Roy Cady is not the same as what he does to them, which is to say that after a smoking spasm of violence, they are mostly dead and he is mostly alive.Before Roy makes his getaway, he realizes there are two women in the apartment, one of them still breathing, and he sees something in her frightened, defiant eyes that causes a fateful decision. He takes her with him as he goes on the run from New Orleans to Galveston, Texas—an action as ill-advised as it is inescapable. The girl’s name is Rocky, and she is too young, too tough, too sexy—and far too much trouble. Roy, Rocky, and her sister hide in the battered seascape of Galveston’s country-western bars and fleabag hotels, a world of treacherous drifters, pickup trucks, and ashed-out hopes. Any chance that they will find safety there is soon lost. Rocky is a girl with quite a story to tell, one that will pursue and damage Roy for a very long time to come in this powerful and atmospheric thriller, impossible to put down. Constructed with maximum tension and haunting aftereffect, written in darkly beautiful prose, Galveston announces the arrival of a major new literary talent.

    The two detectives soon find themselves up against institutionalised racism and the worst killers in the USA.

    Sughrue, a Montana investigator who kills time by working at a topless bar. Hired to track down a derelict author, he ends up on the trail of a girl missing in Haight-Ashbury for a decade. The tense hunt becomes obsessive as Sughrue takes a haunting journey through the underbelly of America's sleaziest nightmares.

    But then he slips--he meets a young "model" and begins an affair. One night he arrives at his girlfriend's apartment and finds more than he bargained for. Two masked men have caught his misdemeanors on camera and now they want a cool hundred grand. But they've picked the wrong man, because Harry Mitchell doesn't get mad--he gets even.

    The one book Black Lizard never published, it's the dream-like tale of a man after a jailbreak, who meets up with the woman of his dreams... and his nightmares. Phenomenal work of the period, ranking with the best efforts of Thompson, Woolrich, Goodis et al.

    In a bleak Texas prison Royce, an alcoholic doctor administers Bobby Mencken's last "high," convinced that the convicted killer was innocent. When Royce's marriage crumbles he takes off for Dallas to search for the real killer.Of Nisbet, Germany's Die Welt wrote, "Neither Norman Mailer nor Truman Capote has in their writing been able to produce such an intensity as Nisbet has achieved."With sharp humor and a poet's ear for language, Nisbet's world may be bleak, but it is frighteningly real. Overlook is proud to bring him to a new generation of readers.

    He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.

    But can he find safety in the skin of another man...a worse man...a sinner man...?Long before he became the award-winning creator of Matthew Scudder (A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES) and an MWA Grand Master, Lawrence Block penned this tough, unforgettable crime novel, his very first. But as he describes in a new afterword, the book wound up published only eight years later, under a different title and a fake name—and was then lost for half a century. Now appearing for the first time under Block’s real name, with revisions by the author, SINNER MAN is revealed as a powerful work by a young novelist destined to become one of the giants of the mystery genre. First publication in almost 50 years—and first ever under author’s real name! Lawrence Block is one of the most acclaimed living crime writers, having won every major award in the genre (including 5 Edgar Awards) and been named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America Block’s novel A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES became the movie starring Liam Neeson

    ...and two robbers hired by a local crime boss manage to heist half a million dollars from an armored car. But getting the money and getting away with it are two different things, especially with a blizzard coming down, the cops in hot pursuit, and a double-crossing gambler and a murderous park ranger threatening to turn this white Christmas blood red.

    Until the day a shadowy rival known only as The Trader has her abducted and scarred for life as a warning to stay out of his way.Now Cay’s on her way to Mazatlan, where one of The Trader’s men has been spotted. There’s a big deal going down – but she’s not there to make a score. Just to settle one.