It begins in the small Iowa town of Steubenville, where a seemingly respectable citizen takes a head-over-heels tumble on a department store escalator. As if on cue, Cadillacs — 31 in all — start disappearing from lots in the San Francisco Bay area, as a team of scam artists use phone fraud, bank fraud, and pure criminal genius to do one California bank out of $1.3 million worth of Detroit’s finest. The bank wants those cars back, and turns to Daniel Kearny Associates to get it done. Rock-jawed, relentless Dan Kearny puts his best agents, as well as two new ones, on the case. It doesn’t take long for Kearny’s team to find out what they’re up against: Gyppos. Con artists, scammers, liars, thieves and dangerous charmers, Gypsies are one nation united in street crime. And since the escalator fall has mortally wounded their beloved King, they’ve decided to get to his funeral in Cadillac style. But there’s one more Cadillac to contend with: the shocking pink 1958 Cadillac ragtop convertible the dying leader insists on being buried in. The Gypsy who can get his hands on one is sure to be the next King... or Queen. When the tilt starts, it’s Gypsies 32, DKA O. But by the second inning the score changes. From San Francisco to Hawaii, from Florida to New York, it’s a matter of everybody scamming everybody in a cross-country duel of wits and nerves. And the action won’t let up until both repomen and Gyppos reach the dying Gypsy King — and the ultimate scam of all

The gang was restless, just looking for some idle fun, when they roughed up a man they thought was a homosexual. The game got out of hand; their victim was blinded. It was Paula Halstead’s bad luck to witness the attack and to catch a glimpse of one of the boys. He knows they must track her down and somehow or other make her keep her mouth shut. They find her alone in the house and, in their mindless way, decide that a gang rape would guarantee her silence. In this they are very successful. She commits suicide. When her husband, Professor Curtis Halstead, comes home from a late meeting, he finds her body and a cryptic note. From that moment, he begins to change from the complacent, philosophic, civilized man he has become to a single-minded weapon poised for vengeance. He retrains his body to what it had been when he was a young commando during the war. Slowly, methodically, he tracks down the boys responsible for his wife’s death. In his mind, they are murderers. A cynical homicide detective points out that the law won’t pursue them too diligently because even if they’re caught, their age protects them from severe sentence. He knows their punishment is in his hands and he intends to extract maximum revenge. He can think no further. A TIME OF PREDATORS is a novel of violence and suspense. Beyond that, it poses the perennially fascinating question of moral justification for an individual’s deeds. How far may one go to protect or avenge his own? How deeply do the accumulated layers of civilized training cover man’s aggressive instincts? Can Curtis Halstead, a dedicated teacher of philosophy, premeditate and execute the killing of four teenagers? THE GANG: Eric Dean, nineteen, darkly handsome, a charmer to women young and old, a magnetic leader of a group of four boys who ran around together in high school. His father is an insurance broker, well-to-do. Julio Escobar, eighteen, one of Rick’s followers and vaguely envious of Rick’s leadership. Julio’s parents work in a laundry, are God-fearing Spanish-American folks. Delbert “Heavy” Gander, eighteen, played tackle on the football team of which Rick was quarterback, Julio halfback. Immensely overweight, full of fears and tensions and insufficiencies. His widowed father is a sheet-metal worker, Heavy, a good mechanic. Ernest “Champ” Mather, twenty-one, fourth member of the gang. Quit high school when his football eligibility ended. Very low I.Q., devotedly doglike, but enjoys inflicting pain, extremely powerful. Too dumb for military service, works as a gardener

In 1953 Pierce Duncan leaves college as an innocent and sets off to see America. His road trip will take him from the savagery of a Georgia chain gang to a wild ride through Texas to the darkest side of the Las Vegas fight game — and, finally, to San Francisco, the far end of the world. Along the backstreets and freight lines Dunc will meet beautiful women, dangerous men, and murder. And in California, home of the lost and the outcast, he will join up with the dynamic head of a private investigation agency. Here he will learn everything about being a man — and about brutal betrayal. Joe Gores has written a violence-marked love letter to a lost time in America, and a San Francisco roiling with the unexpected. With Dunc’s mind teeming with the cadences of Hemingway and Joyce. CASES is also an ode to the art of writing itself: writing as vivid as a lightning storm over a lonely highway, as unforgettable as a first kiss, as haunting as a dead woman’s eyes

Runyan had spent eight years in San Quentin, but now he was out and ready to lead a quiet life, an honest life. But while he was away there were people planning for the day of his release, people who wanted the two million dollars in diamonds Runyan was carrying just before he went to jail. People like the insurance investigator who arranged his parole. People like the mysterious former “partners” who want their cut. People like a beautiful woman who seems to want him alive. And people like the unknown killer who definitely wants him dead. Runyan plans to get the diamonds from where he had stashed them in order to buy his way out... but they are gone. Now his only hope is to pull another robbery — something he swore never to do again — and use the proceeds to stay alive. COME MORNING is a novel of suspense about murder and betrayal; it is also a novel about love, and two people’s fight to live on their own terms despite overwhelming odds

On a Hollywood studio lot a dancing bear does a little pickpocketing on the side. In Son Francisco the repo men of Daniel Kearny Associates ore on a nonstop campaign to repossess twenty-seven classic cars from twenty-seven people who will go to classic lengths to keep them. And in a fortress in the Big Sur wilderness a rich man vows to steal an ultraprecious collectors’ item. Soon the dancing bear, DKA, and the millionaire will entangle in a twisted plot of betrayal and murder. It all starts when the dancing bear actually a full-blooded Gypsy in o fur suit — is unceremoniously killed. Now the police are searching for the bear’s beautiful Gypsy wife, Yana. At the request of the Gypsy King, whose honorable world of thievery does not tolerate murder, the men and women of DKA also look for her. But the seductive, ever-changing Yana is eluding them all, and working on a new grift of her own. Meanwhile, the tribe raises cosh for a moss pilgrimage to the holy city of Rome — just in time for the Jubilee celebration and a feast of tourists. And while a crime wave is erupting in California, while the cops are distracted by their hunt for Yana and every head is turned in the wrong direction, a helicopter is beating its way to Big Sur, carrying the greatest scam of all. In this sexy hilarious tale action and seduction cops, robbers, and repo men, Joe Gores takes us into a shifting subculture of ancient rituals and cutting-edge cons. With one mystery at its core and another unfolding at its end, Joe Gores latest and most entertaining novel yet should come with a warning: Enjoy the ride, but hold on to your wallet

It’s not the best of times for the repo men and skip tracers of DKA. The big boss has been thrown out of the house by his wife, landing, for the foreseeable future, in Larry Ballard’s apartment. Ken Warren has fallen into the grasp of the sexually predatory mother of a multimillionaire computer geek. Bart Heslip has gone undercover in the Tenderloin, wearing a nose ring, a leather vest, and an attitude. O’B is up in redwood country, getting rained on. And Ballard, for a change, has met a woman who’s a match for him. But while the streets of San Francisco sizzle and DKA’s best snag repos that range from luxury cars to truck tires to the electronic equipment of a talentless heavy metal band, someone is out to punch the agency’s collective ticket for good. It begins with the Mafia-style slaying of a flamboyant union leader. It leads toward a prominent San Francisco money man and a violent feud over a half-billion-dollar computer chip. As the DKA agents slap down REPO ON SIGHT slips, they find themselves drawn into the dark heart of big-city corruption — backed by big shotguns, big money, and big madness. Only Joe Gores could have created these true-to-life bit players, barrooms, boardrooms, and street scenes. And only Joe Gores could have created a story like this — gritty, funny, fast-moving, and unforgettable

Life is a wondrous game for twenty-eight-year-old Eddie Dain. There’s phone chess with his beautiful wife, Marie. There’s the joy of his three-year old son. There’s his career using software to ferret out soft-core bad guys without ever leaving his computer. But when Eddie decides that a seemingly accidental death was no accident at all, it all blows up in his face. A new and shadowy enemy sends out two killers with shotguns. When they are through with him, Eddie has to be reborn. As a dead man. He’s dead to joy, dead to his past. Loveless and obsessed, he goes by the single name of Dain, lives with a cat who won’t purr, and thumbs through a bloodstained copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Building up his body and an arsenal of lethal skills that Eddie never had, Dain hires himself out as a manhunter — because somewhere out there in an underworld of criminals and contract killers are the two men who destroyed his life. Dain’s break comes in Chicago, leads him to a beautiful stripper in New Orleans, and plunges him into the steaming swamps of the Louisiana bayou country. There, Dain will get his chance to separate truths from lies, traitors from friends, the living from the dead

Dead Skip is the first novel in a remarkable new series Ellery Queen calls “authentic as a fist in your face.” With it, Joe Gores, the double Edgar-winner who spent twelve years as a private investigator, shows just how fresh and compelling the detective novel really can be

The first DKA File novel, Dead Skip, was called “superb in its swift, to-the-point plotting and on-the-mark dialogue. Dan Kearny’s detectives are Lew Archer in concert, and Joe Gores’ novel ranks at the head of its class.” — O. L. Bailey, Saturday Review In Final Notice Joe Gores has done it again. Here are the same characters, the same “fist in the face of authenticity.”[1] Joe Gores demonstrates once more how fresh and compelling the detective novel really can be

Gustave Wallberg, President of the USA and Leader of the Free World, has a dark past. And it’s returned to haunt him. His head is in the sights of Halden Corwin — a man he thought was dead, a man with a sniper’s eye, an assassin’s mind and a grudge that goes back decades. Ex-CIA operative Brendan Thorne is the only man capable of stopping Corwin. But as he stalks his quarry through the frozen forests of Montana, Thorne discovers that the relentless greed and ruthless ambitions of Capitol Hill are far more deadly than the adversary he’s facing. Caught in a web of lies and deceit, it’s not the President’s life Thorne needs to save, it’s his own

“I’m going to have your license, shamus!” The line is as familiar to television viewers and readers of detective fiction as the blonde in the bedroom or the bottle in the drawer. But when the State of California cold-bloodedly sets out to grab Dan Kearny’s license, the phrase is no longer a cliché. The “irregular” case upon which the state is building its suit was handled by Kathy Onoda. Now she is dead. As the disciplinary hearings before the State Bureau of Private Investigators proceed, Kearny’s central problem becomes: Who could have witnessed the events in the DKA Oakland office on a rainy Friday afternoon nearly a year before? Seven people. Kearny’s staff ranges the state and then the country in search of them, but they are mysteriously Gone, No Forwarding from their addresses. The search becomes desperate when Kearny’s detectives find other, deadly hunters dogging their footsteps. As Bart Heslip becomes enmeshed in the strange odyssey of a fugitive black girl, it becomes evident that her testimony, and hers alone, can unravel the intricate human puzzle at the core of the novel. Moving, often comic, always taut, Gone, No Forwarding is another intensely real picture of modern investigative techniques from Joe Gores, the writer Anthony Boucher called “one of the very few authentic private eyes to enter the field of fiction since Dashiell Hammett.” The author gives us break-neck action, sparkling characterizations, machine-gun dialogue and, as critic James Sandoe said, “He handles violence as a wise man handles nettles.”

Neil Fargo was a hard-nosed private investigator with a business on the side: heroin. The investigating he did on his own; the drug line he shared with a man called Walter Harriss. Fargo was strong enough, cool enough, to live in two worlds, and tough enough to keep control of both. Until he hired Docker. Docker, Fargo explained to Harriss, was an old army buddy. He would make a damn good bag man. He could be trusted. So when a drug shipment arrived, Fargo set up a meeting: the drug courier, a chemist to test the drugs for purity, and Docker. All Docker had to do was hand over a briefcase full of money and collect the shipment. But Docker did more than that: the courier was found dead, the chemist beaten — the drugs and the money were gone. And Fargo had to answer to Harriss for Docker’s disappearance. INTERFACE is the story of a chase: Harriss and Fargo both know that if they don’t stop Docker from getting out of San Francisco, they’ll never see the drugs or the money again. They’ll do anything to stop him — and Docker will do anything to keep from getting caught. But it’s also the story of Fargo, a man walking the tightrope between two lives, determined to survive in both

A collection of eight stories. Includes the first appearance of the DKA File Series, and “Goodbye Pops” which won an Edgar for the Best Short Story of the Year. Joe Gores has written over 100 short stories, a dozen screen and teleplays (for such series as Columbo, B. L. Stryker, and Magnum PI), and eight novels, including the Edgar-winning Time of Predators

Dashiell Hammett and William Vollmann are just two treats in this stellar sequel to the smash-hit original volume of San Francisco Noir, which captures the dark mythology of a world-class locale

A wonderfully dark, pitch-perfect noir prequel to The Maltese Falcon, featuring Dashiell Hammett’s beloved detective, Sam Spade. It’s 1921 — seven years before Sam Spade will solve the famous case of the Maltese Falcon. He’s just set up his own agency in San Francisco and he gets off to a quick start, working cases (he doesn’t do domestic) and hiring a bright young secretary named Effie Perrine. When he’s hired by a prominent San Francisco banker to find his missing son, Spade gets the break he’s been looking for. He spends the next few years dealing with booze runners, waterfront thugs, banking swindlers, gold smugglers, and bumbling cops. He brings in Miles Archer as a partner to help bolster the agency, though it was Archer who stole his girl while he was fighting in World War I. All along, Spade will tangle with an enigmatic villain who holds a long-standing grudge against Spade. And, of course, he’ll fall in love — though it won’t turn out for the best. It never does with dames

Bestselling novelist James Ellroy introduces this year’s collection of the finest mystery writing. Many of the contributors herein are novelists themselves, displaying their talents in short story form: Michael Connelly tells a fatal tale of revenge in “Two-Bagger.” In Joe Gores’s “Inscrutable,” the Feds beat the Mafia at their own game. Stuart Kaminsky demonstrates how horribly wrong things go when a robber gets cocky in “Sometimes Something Goes Wrong.” And Robert B. Parker shows just how important Jackie Robinson’s fans can be in “Harlem Nocturne.” Also featured are veterans of the short story form and favorites of this series. Brendan DuBois’s “A Family Game” introduces a former Mafia family trying to lead a normal life in the Witness Protection Program. Joyce Carol Oates tells a chilling tale of a crush taken too far in “The High School Sweetheart.” A tenant sneaks into the murder crime scene next door in Michael Downs’s “Man Kills Wife, Two Dogs.” Readers will be captivated by all the stories herein, whether by famed novelists or masters of the short story

Featuring the best from the modern masters of detective, intrigue, suspense, and mystery fiction

Pulp fiction has been looked down on as a guilty pleasure, but it offers the perfect form of entertainment: the very best storytelling filled with action, surprises, sound and fury. In short, all the exhiliration of a roller-coaster ride. The 1920s in America saw the proliferation of hundreds of dubiously named but thrillingly entertaining pulp magazines in America: Black Mask, Amazing, Astounding, Spicy Stories, Ace-High, Detective Magazine, Dare-Devil Aces. It was in these luridly-coloured publications, printed on the cheapest pulp paper, that the first gems began to appear. The one golden rule for writers of pulp fiction was to adhere to the art of storytelling. Each story had to have a beginning, an end, economically-etched characters, but plenty going on, both in terms of action and emotions. Pulp magazines were the TV of their day, plucking readers from drab lives and planting them firmly in thrilling make-believe, successors

«Старые традиции рушатся, новые не успевают занять их место. И из брешей выползают хищники». ...Четверка юных подонков насилует жену профессора университета. Полиция отказывается искать преступников, и тогда профессор решает самостоятельно найти и покарать их

«ИСКАТЕЛЬ» — советский и российский литературный альманах. Издаётся с 1961 года. Публикует фантастические, приключенческие, детективные, военно-патриотические произведения, научно-популярные очерки и статьи. В 1961–1996 годах — литературное приложение к журналу «Вокруг света», с 1996 года — независимое издание. В 1961–1996 годах выходил шесть раз в год, в 1997–2002 годах — ежемесячно; с 2003 года выходит непериодически

Имя Альфреда Хичкока, создателя знаменитых американских фильмов ужасов, известно всему миру. Однако немногие у нас в стране знают, что Хичкок выступал в качестве «крестного отца» десятков авторов остросюжетных произведений: книги из серии «Хичкок представляет» популярны у читающей публики всех континентов. Сборник «Истории, от которых не заснешь ночью» — из этой серии. Он даст нашему читателю яркое представление о том, что такое настоящий триллер: «крутой» сюжет, драки и ужасы, от которых и впрямь кое-кто начинает бояться темноты

Кому мстят мертвые? На этот вопрос вы получите вполне исчерпывающий ответ, прочтя этот сборник остросюжетных рассказов американских и английских писателей. Эти истории написаны в жанре «саспенс», психологической новеллы-детектива, в основе которой заложены современные теории психоанализа человеческого поведения

Описана история водолазного и судоподъемно-спасательного дела с древнейших времен и до наших дней. Подробно рассказано о поисках и подъеме затонувших кораблей и подводных лодок, о трудной работе морских спасателей и эволюции водолазной и судопоъемной техники. Приведены примеры расчистки портов от кораблей, затонувших во время войн и стихийных бедствий. Рассмотрены перспективы развития водолазного дела, судоподъемной техники и покорения морских глубин. Книга адресована водолазам-специалистам, спасателям, морякам, историкам и всем лицам, интересующихся историей судостроения и мореплавания

Описана история водолазного и судоподъемно-спасательного дела с древнейших времен и до наших дней. Подробно рассказано о поисках и подъеме затонувших кораблей и подводных лодок, о трудной работе морских спасателей и эволюции водолазной и судоподъемной техники. Приведены примеры расчистки портов от кораблей, затонувших во время войн и стихийных бедствий. Рассмотрены перспективы развития водолазного дела, судоподъемной техники и покорения морских глубин. Книга адресована водолазам-специалистам, спасателям, морякам, историкам и всем лицам, интересующимся историей судостроения и мореплавания

Заключенный сбежал из тюрьмы, чтобы проводить умирающего отца

Все мы хорошо знаем великого кинорежиссера, мастера триллера Алфреда Хичкока. Однако немногим известно, что Хичкок многие годы собирал страшные истории, придуманные американскими писателями, и составлял сборники детективов, которые были очень популярны в Америке. Составительская работа помогала Хичкоку в его основном деле — кино, литература подсказывала сюжеты и характеры для будущих фильмов. В этой книге отобраны детективные рассказы из разных сборников А. Хичкока. Книге предпослана вступительная статья Ю. Комова, рассказывающая о жизни и творчестве А. Хичкока