What are the ingredients of a hard-boiled detective story? “Savagery, style, sophistication, sleuthing, and sex,” said Ellery Queen. Often a desperate blond, a jealous husband, and, of course, a tough-but-tender P.I. the likes of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Perhaps Raymond Chandler summed it up best in his description of Dashiell Hammett’s style: “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it... He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.” Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind, with over half of the stories...

Вы могли читать мои переводы Эндрю Ваксса (я единственный официальный его представитель на русском литпространстве) Флад (первая книга про Берка, профессионального преступника. В серии 18 книг, я переведу их все), рассказы про то, кто вырастает из травмированных детей. Эндрю Ваксс посвятил свою жизнь нашему лучшему будущему. Он считает, что из травмированных детей, в массе, вырастают отвратительные взрослые. Не каждый травмированный ребенок вырастает в монстра, но каждый монстр вырос из травмированного ребенка. Сейчас Эндрю думает про новую серию и эта новелетта про психопата, который пустил плюсы своего характера на пользу обществу. Очень круто. Так и должно быть.

Rockstar Games has partnered with Mulholland Books to publish a collection of short fiction expanding the world of the newest groundbreaking achievement in storytelling: the interactive crime thriller L.A. Noire. 1940s Hollywood, murder, deception and mystery take center stage as readers reintroduce themselves to characters seen in L.A. Noire. Explore the lives of actresses desperate for the Hollywood spotlight; heroes turned defeated men; and classic Noir villains. Readers will come across not only familiar faces, but familiar cases from the game that take on a new spin to tell the tales of emotionally torn protagonists, depraved schemers and their ill-fated victims. With original...

Burke, the relentless urban mercenary, returns in this riveting new thriller by bestselling author Andrew Vachss. Two decades ago, Burke "recovered" a teenage runaway from a pimp. Now she's on the run, again. After seeing the man who hired him to find her gunned down by a professional hunter-killer team, Burke realizes he could be next. The master urban survivalist knows he has to finish the job to learn the truth, only now he's looking for a predator, not a victim. The search will force Burke to walk down the one dark alley that has always terrified him -- his past. From the Paperback edition. From Publishers Weekly Hard-boiled crime fans will enjoy the latest entry in...

For years Burke has harbored an outlaw's hard love for Wolfe, the beautiful, driven former sex-crimes prosecutor who was fired for refusing to "go along to get along." So when Wolfe is arrested for the attempted murder of John Anson Wychek, a vicious rapist she once prosecuted, Burke deals himself in. That means putting together a distrustful alliance between his underground "family of choice," Wolfe's private network, and a rogue NYPD detective who has his own stake in the outcome. Burke knows that Wolfe’s alleged "victim," although convicted only once, is actually a serial rapist. The deeper he presses, the more gaping holes he finds in the prosecution’s case, but shadowy law...

After years on the run, Burke is desperate to return to his native New York, the only way he can reconnect with his outlaw "family." But to survive in their part of the City, where reputation is everything, Burke must take major risks to reestablish his presence. So when a Mafia man contacts him about the murder-as-message of his sixteen-year-old daughter - the offspring of what he calls an "outside the tribe" affair that he must keep secret at all costs - Burke's depleted bankroll persuades him to step out of the shadows and do something he hasn't done in years...actually investigate a crime.Burke needs cover to penetrate the teenage subculture of the Long Island town where the girl lived...

Amazon.com Review When last encountered (2000's Dead and Gone), career criminal Burke was on the rebound from a nearly successful assassination attempt, lying low and licking his wounds in Portland, Oregon. Severed from his connections in NYC, Burke survives on jobs--"violence for money" mostly--brokered by his live-in lover, Gem, an Asian beauty with a painful, larcenous past and a present to match. At hand is a task Burke has done before: the recovery of a runaway, a 16-year-old girl named Rosebud. But Burke, an assassin with scruples, knows when things aren't right. Rosebud's father, Kevin, has a '60s-era contempt of "The Man" that doesn't jibe with his obvious wealth. Mother...

When his girlfriend, Crystal Beth, is gunned down at a gay rights rally in Central Park, Burke, the underground man-for-hire and expert hunter of predators, vows vengeance.  But someone beats him to the task: a shadowy killer who calls himself Homo Erectus and who seems determined to wipe gay bashers from the face of the earth.  As the killer's body count rises, most citizens are horrified, but a few see him as a hero, and they hire Burke to track him down...and help him escape. In Choice of Evil, Burke is forced to confront his most harrowing mystery: the mind of an obsessive serial killer.  And soon the emotionally void method behind the killer's madness becomes terrifyingly familiar,...

The new novel from Andrew Vachss puts Burke 'hard-core career criminal and man-for-hire' up against a new breed of predator: stalkers. Some obsessed, some deranged, all dangerous.Burke's old prison pal Hercules, hired by a shadowy network that runs a safehouse for stalking victims, botched the job, and one of the stalkers is dead. To save his partner, Burke has to penetrate the network, and he makes a deal with the boss, Crystal Beth, a woman as obsessed as the stalkers. But Crystal Beth has a stalker of her own, an extortionist who threatens to bring down her entire network unless she surrenders one of the women she's hiding.When Burke learns that the extortionist might be...