Lawrence Block

Keller is a regular guy. He goes to the movies, works on his stamp collection. Call him for jury duty and he serves without complaint. Then every so often he gets a phone call from White Plains that sends him flying off somewhere to kill a perfect stranger. Keller is a pro and very good at what he does. But the jobs have started to go wrong. The realization is slow coming yet, when it arrives, it is irrefutable: Someone out there is trying to hit

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"You may rape the bride..." David and Jill Wade wanted a properly traditional start to their marriage. For openers, they decided to delay its consummation until after the ceremony. They planned a perfect honeymoon at a secluded lakeside resort in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. Joe Carroll, the guest in the cabin next door, seemed friendly enough. They took his dinner suggestion, then returned to their cabin and prepared to retire-until a noise...

Matt Scudder is finally leading a comfortable life. The crime rate's down and the stock market's up. Gentrification's prettying-up the old neighborhood. The New York streets don't look so mean anymore. Then all hell breaks loose. Scudder quickly discovers the spruced-up sidewalks are as mean as ever, dark and gritty and stained with blood. He's living in a world where the past is a minefield, the present is a war zone, and the future's an open question....

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.

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...

Twelve years ago, Matthew Scudder lied to a jury to put James Leo Motley behind bars. Now the ingenious psychopath is free. And the alcoholic ex-cop-turned-P.I. must pay dearly for his sins. Friends and former lovers -- even strangers unfortunate enough to share Scudder's name -- are turning up dead. Because a vengeful maniac is determined not to rest until he's driven his nemesis back to the bottle... and then to the boneyard.

Small-time stoolie, Jake "The Spinner" Jablon, made a lot of new enemies when he switched careers, from informer to blackmailer. And the more "clients", he figured, the more money -- and more people eager to see him dead. So no one is surprised when the pigeon is found floating in the East River with his skull bashed in. And what's worse, no one cares -- except Matthew Scudder. The ex-cop-turned-private-eye is no conscientious avenging angel. But...

A successful socialite's beautiful wife was raped and murdered in her own home -- and Matt Scudder believes the victim's "grieving" husband was responsible for the outrage. But to prove it, the haunted P.I. must descend into the depths of New York's sex-for-sale underworld, where young lives are commodities to be bought, perverted... and destroyed.

With a new wife and a baby on the way, Keller, a.k.a. Nicholas Edwards, is done killing people for money until a phone call from Dot draws him back into the old game, taking him from Dallas to settle a domestic dispute to New York, where people might remember him.

An ancient brotherhood meets annually in the back room of a swank Manhattan restaurant, a fraternity created in secret to celebrate life by celebrating its dead. But the past three decades have not been kind to the Club of 31. Matthew Scudder—ex-cop and ex-boozer—has known death in all its guises, which is why he has been asked to investigate a baffling thirty-year run of suicides and suspiciously random accidents that has thinned the

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