Showing titles in Hard-Boiled

Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Christopher Storer Frank Machianno is a late-middle-aged ex-surf bum who runs a bait shack on the San Diego waterfront. An affable Italian with a love of people and life, he's a stand-up businessman, devoted father, and a beloved fixture in the...

Thirteen bodies are found in a Louisville restaurant. When the police can find no suspect or motive, the family of one of the victims seeks the services of the enigmatic and solitary Roy Prescott, known for his ability to find people who don’t want to be found. Working outside the law and...

Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an...

Robert Pendleton is a chemical genius with a fertilizer worth a fortune to whoever controls the formula. Not surprisingly, the Bank, his notoriously exclusive backer, wants to keep an eye on its investment. But so does the CIA. And the Chinese government. And a few shadier organizations. So when...

Has Tom Hillman run away from his exclusive reform school, or has he been kidnapped? Are his wealthy parents protecting him or their own guilty secrets? And why does every clue lead Lew Archer to an abandoned Hollywood hotel, where starlets and sailors once rubbed shoulders with tycoons and...

Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired Lew Archer to find her. That was plenty of time for a young girl who wanted to disappear to do so thoroughly—or for someone to make her disappear. And before he could locate the Wycherly girl, Archer had to reckon with the...

In this masterful Macdonald mystery, the desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness, and only Lew Archer can make sense of a killer who makes murder a work of art. The era is the 1970s, the settin, Southern California. Private investigator Lew Archer has been hired to retrieve a...

Lew Archer knew he shouldn’t have taken the case, but Alex Kincaid seemed so desperate. Kincaid’s loving new bride Dolly had just inexplicably walked out on him, leaving Kincaid more than a little fearful for her sanity—and her safety. So Archer reluctantly agreed to help Kincaid find her...

The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora Charles, New York’s coolest crime-solving couple. Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later, a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once...

Mike Hammer has been away from New York for too long. Recuperating in Florida after the mob shoot-out that nearly claimed his life, he learns that an old mentor on the New York police force has committed suicide. Hammer returns for the funeral—and because he knows that Inspector Doolan would...

A hitchhiker stumbles to his knees on the side of a dark road. Private detective Lew Archer stops his car. When he gets to the young man, Archer realizes that he has stumbled into a mess—for the hitchhiker is dying of a gunshot wound. In a matter of hours, Archer is suspected by the law, hired...

In the penultimate installment of this masterful crime-fiction series, Martin Beck, now head of the National Murder Squad, is called in to a sleepy part of the countryside to investigate a woman’s disappearance. What Beck doesn’t know is that the woman has already been murdered, her body...

Detective-story master Dashiell Hammett gives us yet another unforgettable read in Red Harvest. When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty—even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel...

When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his wife, who stand to inherit, as well as a questionable chauffeur and a tycoon of a company trying to get the woman’s property for the oil under it. Private...

Like many Southern California millionaires, Ralph Sampson keeps odd company. There’s the sun-worshiping holy man whom Sampson once gave his very own mountain and the fading actress with sidelines in astrology and S&M. Now, one of Sampson’s friends may have arranged his kidnapping. As private...

As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, private investigator Lew Archer tracks a missing child who may be the pawn in a marital struggle or the victim of a bizarre kidnapping. What he uncovers amid the ashes is murder—and a trail of motives...

In midtown Manhattan, Mike Hammer, recovering from a near-fatal mix-up with the Mob, runs into drug dealers assaulting a young hospital messenger. He saves the kid, but the muggers are not so lucky. Hammer considers the rescue a one-off, but someone has different ideas, as indicated by a...

The lethal stuff of legends For Jessica Tregarth, an unexpected invitation to visit her grandfather in England comes as a wonderful surprise, an opportunity to open doors to a family history that have always been closed to her. But her arrival is greeted by mysterious villains who pursue her...

Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there’d be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment...

Ross Macdonald is one of the “Big Three” in American hard-boiled detective fiction, along with Chandler and Hammett. In The Barbarous Coast, tough, thoughtful private eye Lew Archer pursues a girl who jackknifed too suddenly from high diving to high living. Archer’s investigation leads him...