Lawrence Block
1) Hit parade
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Series
John Keller novels volume 3
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Description
Introspective professional assassin John Keller continues to ponder his life, the ethics of his lethal career, and his possible retirement as he accepts a couple of dubious contracts.
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Series
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Description
Alex Penn wakes up in a squalid Times Square hotel room. This is what he sees when he finally opens his eyes:
"The floor was a sea of blood. A body floated upon this ocean. A girl-black hair, staring blue eyes, bloodless lips. Naked. Dead. Her throat slashed deeply.
"It had to be a dream. It had to, had to be a dream. It was not a dream. It was not a dream at all.
"I've done it again, I thought. Sweet Jesus, I've done it again."
Years before,...
Author
Series
Matthew Scudder mysteries volume 16
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Description
As private investigator Matthew Scudder contemplates retirement, he takes on a case for a friend who wants a background check on his daughter's suitor and finds himself menaced by a killer from the past.
4) Hit and run
Author
Series
John Keller novels volume 4
Pub. Date
[2008]
Description
A hit man accused of assassinating the governor of Ohio must clear his name and outwit the real killer who's out to gun him down.
Author
Pub. Date
[2020]
Description
A story "recounted in journal form by its protagonist, and begins when he walks into a roadhouse outside of Bakersfield, California, and walks out with a woman. And rapes and murders her. But, um, not in that order. Right. But it's what he does with the rest of his life that's really interesting..."--Publisher's description.
6) Small town
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Description
New York is really a small town, filled with men and women from all walks of life whose aspirations, fears, disappointments, and triumphs are interconnected by bonds as unbreakable as they are unseen.
7) Candy
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Pub. Date
2011
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Description
When a married businessman falls for a small-town minx, his obsessive love will spur him to give up anything to have her
Jeff Flanders has a nice little job, a nice little wife, and absolutely nothing to get excited about. All that goes down the drain when he meets Candy, a small-town girl who looks as sweet as her name, but is bitter to the core. She offers him her body—the best he's ever seen—for the bargain price of $1,000, and
...Author
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That's the product description for Blackstone Audio's excellent rendition of You Could Call It Murder, expertly voiced by Peter Berkrot, and we could leave it at that-but there's an interesting backstory to the book, and the Classic Crime Library seems a good place to share it with you.
In 1961, Lawrence Block was living in New York and earning a living writing Midcentury Erotica and crime fiction. He'd just sold his first book under his own name,...
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Series
Pub. Date
2012
Description
Nobody knows better than Matthew Scudder how far down a person can sink in this city. A young prostitute named Kim knew it also-and she wanted out. Maybe Kim didn't deserve the life fate had dealt her. She surely didn't deserve her death. The alcoholic ex-cop turned P.I. was supposed to protect her, but someone slashed her to ribbons on a crumbling New York City waterfront pier. Now finding Kim's killer will be Scudder's penance. But there are lethal...
Author
Series
Chip Harrison mysteries volume 4
Pub. Date
2006
Description
Here's CHIP HARRISON-the second series character created by Lawrence Block, bestselling author of A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES...
How can a series predicated on the hero's sexual innocence survive past a second book? How can our Chip remain the same age forever? Simple, Block decided, and put our Lecher in the Wry to work for a private detective, the remarkable Leo Haig. Haig believes that Nero Wolfe really exists, and that if he distinguishes himself...
Author
Pub. Date
2009
Description
SO A WAR VET, A PSYCHOPATH, AND A HOT BABE WALK INTO WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK...
...and years later they tell us what Greenwich Village was like in the 1950s. Lawrence Block was on the scene, just starting to find himself as a writer, and A Diet of Treacle was his attempt to get it all down on paper.
It was published by a low-rent paperback house, with a tacky title and a pen name, and disappeared from view until Hard Case Crime found it and published...
Author
Series
Matthew Scudder mysteries volume 1
Pub. Date
2009
Description
The pretty young prostitute is dead. Her alleged murderer-a minister's son-hanged himself in his jail cell. The case is closed. But the dead girl's father has come to Matthew Scudder for answers, sending the unlicensed private investigator in search of terrible truths about a life that was lived and lost in a sordid world of perversion and pleasures.
13) Grifter's Game
Author
Pub. Date
2008
Description
Your name's Joe Marlin, but you change it almost as often as you change your shirt. It's David Gavilan when you skip a hotel bill and head for Atlantic City. You left empty-handed, and you need luggage to check into a decent hotel, so you grab two checked bags before the owner turns up to claim them. They're monogrammed L.K.B.-so now your name is Leonard K. Blake.
But you're not the only L.K.B. in Atlantic City. L. Keith Brassard is the owner of...
Author
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
"Cashed out from the NYPD after 24 years, Doak Miller operates as a private eye in steamy small-town Florida, doing jobs for the local police. Like posing as a hit man and wearing a wire to incriminate a local wife who's looking to get rid of her husband. But when he sees the wife, when he looks into her deep blue eyes... He falls--and falls hard. Soon he's working with her, against his employer, plotting a devious plan that could get her free from...
15) Sinner man
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Series
Pub. Date
2016.
Description
"To escape punishment for a murder he didn't mean to commit, insurance man Don Barshter has to take on a new identity: Nathaniel Crowley, ferocious up-and-comer in the New York mob. But can he find safety in the skin of another man ... a worse man ... a sinner man?"--
Author
Pub. Date
2016
Description
In a truly unprecedented literary achievement by author and editor Lawrence Block, this newly-commissioned anthology of seventeen superbly-crafted stories, each inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. Contributors include Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler, Michael Connelly, Megan Abbott, Craig Ferguson, Nicholas Christopher, Jill D. Block, Joe R. Lansdale, Justin Scott, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Warren Moore, Jonathan Santlofer,...
Author
Series
Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries volume 1
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Description
This first outing for the Greenwich Village burglar finds Bernie set up for a fall when a simple job turns out to involve murder and the conveniently timed arrival of the cops.
Author
Series
Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries volume 10
Pub. Date
[2004]
Description
"Antiquarian bookseller by day, burglar by night, Bernie Rhodenbarr has an innate knack, a gift, for getting into places designed to keep him out." "Sophisticated yet down-to-earth, philosophical yet practical, Bernie is a gentleman who knows and loves his territory, the gloriously diverse and electric streets of Manhattan; a connoisseur who surrounds himself with the finer things in life, including his tailless Manx tabby, Raffles, and good friends...
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Series
Pub. Date
2013
Description
Lawrence Block’s seventeen Matthew Scudder novels have won the hearts of readers throughout the world—along with a bevy of awards including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe (Germany), and the Maltese Falcon (Japan). But Scudder has starred in short fiction as well, and here is volume two which includes the following stories: Looking for David, Let’s Get Lost, A Moment of Wrong Thinking, Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen, and One...
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Pub. Date
2015
Description
A military noir thriller from early in Lawrence Block's lengthy career, it deals with an ex-Green Beret, Paul Kavanagh, who is called out of semi-retirement on a little island in Florida to steal a shipment of high-tech weapons being stored in South Dakota -- an entertaining stand-alone with plenty of twists and turns and reversals, as military heists are apparently not that easy to pull off.