A collection of suspense stories, puzzle stories, whodunits and tricky whydunits involving police detectives, private eyes, talented and sometimes lucky amateurs, armchair detectives, and ethnic detectives.

Paul Benjamin could be your neighbor — if you live in a large city. He lives in a roomy old apartment on New York’s upper West Side. He’s an accountant who has lived in the city all of his life. His daughter is married and he is comfortably settled with his wife in their old apartment, in the middle of the city and all its problems — pollution, drugs, cost of living and, particularly, crime in the streets. Like most New Yorkers, Paul is concerned about the crime rate, but he has never been afraid. Not until one day when crime crosses his own threshold. Suddenly, Paul and his family are the people you read about in the newspapers, victims of a vicious, unprovoked attack. For a few days,...

In a little Mexican village, the American Ambassador is abducted. With him a Peace Corps volunteer, a nervous kid with a conscience, is picked up by mistake. The kidnappers are presumed to be Cuban exiles, anti-Castro terrorists. They have just committed the biggest mistake of their lives. In a fitting follow-up to his highly-acclaimed first novel. Fear in a Handful of Dust, John Ives has created a heroine to be long remembered. Carole Marchand is forty-three, attractive, sophisticated, a film director with a tart tongue. She is weary of letting her fantasies play themselves out on celluloid. When tragedy strikes her son. she is determined to act. While her unflappable ex-husband Howard...

“THE PRESIDENT HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED!” It all happened so fast: the terrorist bombings of Congress which killed nearly a hundred senators and congressmen; the incredible kidnapping of the President-Elect, Clifford Fairlie.　 Tough, veteran agent David Lime was summoned to track down the kidnappers, who threatened to kill Fairlie if the captured terrorists were not set free. And behind the scenes, ruthless men battled for the glory of the highest office in the land. The rescue efforts swung into high gear. It became a vast, global manhunt. The entire world watched in frozen horror. But only two men had the power to shape the end of this chilling, savage drama — agent Lime and the...

A taut collection of razor-sharp stories of men at society's edge. Although best known as an author of westerns and espionage fiction, Brian Garfield is at heart an observer of human behavior. While traveling, he sometimes writes short fiction, usually setting the story in whatever city or country he just left. The eight stories in this slim volume are fine examples of Garfield's keen eye. Mostly tales of crime and criminals, they star men like Deke Allen, a long-haired building contractor arrested after a rat-shoot for driving with his father's shotgun on the seat. There are women like Vicky, a desperate con artist who engineers one of history's most outlandish scams. But running...

Meet Simon Crane, the hottest hard-boiled antihero since Mike Hammer! Неге’s an ex-cop who’s up to his neck in blood, booty, and blackmail: Number One target in a gangland countdown to murder. The Hit resounds with a tough, ingenious triple-crossing twist — alter all, who would rob the Mafia?　 Author Brian Garfield scores a criminal bull’s-eye in this uncompromising thriller that rips the veneer off the Establishment of a sleepy southwestern state, exposing a merry-go-round of murder, vice, and mob control. It all explodes when a Cosa Nostra kingpin is found dead m the living room of his palatial estate. A gaping wall safe discloses the killer’s motive: a missing three million dollars...

Crime is the American preoccupation. And in this novel the author of the controversial, best-selling Death Wish continues his dramatic inquest into crime and retribution. Vigilanteeism: Does it solve any problems, or does it only create new ones? And is it the answer to the problem of criminals who have been “recycled” because of jammed court dockets and the prevalent, quick-solution use of plea-bargaining? In DEATH SENTENCE the reader sees the grisly consequences of one man’s private campaign of vengeance. What happens when innocent people are influenced by widespread vigilante publicity into taking the law into their own hands? What happens in the mind of an avenger when he discovers that...

Somewhere in the desert a girl has only minutes to live. A freaked-out rock group, a tyrannical industrialist, a very clever Mexican cop — the ingredients of a highly explosive confrontation.

An American Army combat unit in war-torn Vietnam, a prison camp behind enemy lines, a strategically important railroad bridge on the Sang Chu River — these are the ingredients of this gripping suspense novel. Here, set in bold relief against a background of slashing monsoon rain and upthrust poison pungi stakes of elusive traitors and friendly Montagnard tribesmen, in the timely and dramatic story of Colonel David Tyreen’s eight man suicide mission into North Vietnam. Of first priority in the rescue, before he talks, of Eddie Kreizler, held for interrogation by torture in a Viet Minh camp in North Vietnam. Second mission — to destroy the railroad bridge on the Sang Chu, protected from air...

He’s fat. He’s old. He’s conceited. He’s rumpled. He inhabits a violent world — the CIA — yet he is non-violent. He loves two things, and only two, in all the world: eating and practicing his trade. He is an international troubleshooter, and he’s the best there is. He is Charlie Dark. The gang from Hopscotch is back, with Charlie Dark replacing Miles Kendig as the loner, the misfit who doesn’t fit the buttoned-down image of the Agency. His superior, Myerson, is here, and he hates Charlie as much as he hated Kendig. Cutter and Ross return, and so does Yaskov, the Soviet super-spy. Checkpoint Charlie is Brian Garfield’s brilliant sequel to Hopscotch, the novel which won an Edgar Allan Poe...