Shayne isn't one to say no to a gorgeous, rich young doll who gets absolutely everything she wants — and what she wants is him. But he changes his tune when he finds her cold and lifeless body on his bed. The dead girl's stepfather is a slippery politician who'd be happy to watch Shayne fry — for a crime he didn't commit. Mike Shayne knows it's a frame-up. But what exactly is the game… and who's calling the plays?

A young Miami insurance executive can’t remember whether or not he’s a killer. He remembers a red-headed man who once said, “Murder is my business.” That’s how Mike Shayne gets into the case of amnesia, alibis, and anguish in Miami Beach and the Florida Keys

A pleasure cruise had become a trip into terror by the time Mike Shayne boarded the Queen Elizabeth II. A brilliant English scientist sat drunk in the bar waiting for death. A beautiful, sexy American girl kept popping up very much alive in other people’s beds. And a shadow crew of killers haunted the corridors, serving the passengers their daily ration of murder. The storm warnings were up, the chips were down — and only Mike Shayne could steer the great liner off a disaster course

COPS AND CORPSES That was the name of the game, and Mike Shayne was playing every lead as if his life depended on it — because it did. The Miami cops were putting on heat strong enough to burn his license. The corpses kept turning up, one, two, three. To top it off, his secretary was being framed for murder by an unknown killer who was determined to put her and Mike out of the picture, one way or another

To learn why a civilian was shot down by an Army sentry, Mike Shayne began digging into garbage cans

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 never published before in book form. Included are thirty-six sublimely suspenseful stories that chronicle the evolution of this quintessentially American art form, from its earliest beginnings during the golden age of the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask in the 1920s, to the arrival of the tough digest Manhunt in the 1950s, and finally leading up to present-day hard-boiled stories by such writers as James Ellroy. Here are eight decades worth of the best writing about betrayal, murder, and mayhem: from Hammett’s 1925 tour de force “The Scorched Face,” in which the disappearance of two sisters leads Hammett’s never-named detective, the Continental Op, straight into a web of sexual blackmail amidst the West Coast elite, to Ed Gorman’s 1992 “The Long Silence After,” a gripping and powerful rendezvous involving a middle class insurance executive, a Chicago streetwalker, and a loaded .38. Other delectable contributions include “Brush Fire” by James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raymond Chandler’s “I’ll Be Waiting,” where, for once, the femme fatale is not blond but a redhead, a Ross Macdonald mystery starring Macdonald’s most famous creator, the cryptic Lew Archer, and “The Screen Test of Mike Hammer” by the one and only Mickey Spillane. The hard-boiled cult has more in common with the legendary lawmen of the Wild West than with the gentleman and lady sleuths of traditional drawing room mysteries, and this direct line of descent is on brilliant display in two of the most subtle and tautly written stories in the collection, Elmore Leonard’s “3:10 to Yuma” and John D. MacDonald’s “Nor Iron Bars.” Other contributors include Evan Hunter (better known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Helen Nielsen, Margaret Maron, Andrew Vachss, Faye Kellerman, and Lawrence Block. Compellingly and compulsively readable, Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is a page-turner no mystery lover will want to be without. Containing many notable rarities, it celebrates a genre that has profoundly shaped not only American literature and film, but how we see our heroes and ourselves

The long-awaited sequel to 2006’s best-selling Miami Noir highlights an outstanding tradition of legendary writers exploring the dark side of paradise

She was a full blown brunette in a bandanna halter that just covered the essentials. The non-essentials were very impressive too. This was just the kind of case Shayne could enjoy. Keeping an eye on a dish like this and getting paid for it to boot

A cryptic note concealed in a DEAD MAN’S DIARY causes Mike Shayne to return to the past, to trace the secret of the dead man’s life — and he finds himself dangerously involved in murder, both past and present. In A TASTE FOR COGNAC, Mike and a copper-haired girl reporter from New York uncover the crime story of the year — but twenty-four terror-filled hours on a gunmen’s island hideaway create some reasonable doubt whether they will live to tell it. In DINNER AT DUPRE’S, one of Mike Shayne’s clients gets rubbed out in the French Quarter of New Orleans before he can get to Mike’s office. And the client’s untimely death gets Mike into a deep dish of homicide, blackmail, bigamy, kidnaping, and assorted other skulduggery. The cops are after Mike’s blood and nothing but a game of dodge and run saves his license and his skin