A target's wife makes a cold-hearted assassin question his work The hitman adjusts his rifle sight in an apartment across the street from his mark. For thirty minutes he peers through his scope, watching the man he is about to kill. He waits patiently, for assassinations demand focus. One bullet is all he needs. When the job is done, he disappears.   This is an ordinary working day for Richard Breckner, a hired gun on the payroll of one of America's...

A professor saves the ex-wife of a Wall Street millionaire from jumping off a bridge and falls in love. Professor Goldman, 78, proposes and Elizabeth Hopper, 47, accepts. A few days later she is arrested for her husband's murder. Will Goldman run or stand by her? By the author of The Trial of Abigail Goodman.

An insurance investigator chases a vanished heiress- and a huge payday One of the richest girls on Park Avenue is missing. Cynthia Brandon left her father's apartment on Monday, and three days later has not been seen anywhere on the respectable side of town. She may have been kidnapped, or murdered. Or she may have simply gotten bored with her pampered life in a twenty-two-room apartment, and split.   Harvey Krim wouldn't care about Cynthia if it...

Dissatisfied with life on the Upper East Side, a socialite finds a new favorite pastime: robbing banks When James R. Hastings, president of the City Federal Bank, began construction of a new branch on Madison Avenue, he vowed to make it burglar proof. Vaults set forty feet below ground, an array of cameras, and a quartet of burly guards were intended to deter any bandit. But James Hastings did not count on being robbed by his wife.   Three weeks...

Japanese-American Beverly Hills homicide detective Masao Masuto is a karate expert, a devotee of roses, and a Zen Buddhist. He does his job with a cool, caustic wit-and with surprising force when necessary. He possesses a singular sense of justice, taking action on his own and occasionally pushing the boundaries of the law… The Case of the Sliding Pool: After a decades-old hidden grave is uncovered by a rainstorm, Detective Masuto must look into...

A lawyer scrambles to save a judge-killing hooker from the gallows No women have been hanged in San Verdo since 1921, but after four decades it looks like that's about to change. Helen Pilasky is far from a sympathetic defendant. She's a known prostitute, and there is strong evidence that she murdered Judge Alexander Knowton, a supreme court justice beloved statewide. More than one hundred thousand people live in San Verdo, and nearly all of them...

A small-town girl flees from the assassin she hired to kill her When the doctor in her small hometown tells Sally Dillman that she has six months to live, the quiet young schoolteacher sells her house and moves to New York City. She comes not to see the sights, not for one last thrill, but to die as quickly as possible. Savings in hand, she pays a mobster $3,000 to put a contract out on her life. She wants to be killed before leukemia saps her strength,...

A rare California deluge unearths a hidden body-and a decades-old crime Rain has spoiled Masao Masuto's vacation. For six days the storm has trapped the Zen Buddhist detective and his family inside their Los Angeles cottage. By the morning of his vacation's final day, he is so stir crazy that the call to come to work is a relief. Detective Masuto knows no better cure for boredom than a puzzling murder.   Nothing remains of the deceased man but his...

A rash of political deaths alerts a New York cop to an international assassination plot At a crime scene, Harry Golding has no fear. But put him in front of a few dozen undergraduates, and he begins to sweat. He agrees to give the lecture on criminology for his brother, a New York University professor, and muddles through it, successful until it comes time for questions. A skinny young conspiracy theorist demands to know what the police are doing...

A dog's murder leads detective Masuto to a most unusual poisoning case In Beverly Hills, murder has suddenly gone out of style. For five weeks, the head of the city's tiny homicide squad, Zen detective Masao Masuto, has worked only robbery investigations. But after more than a month without a corpse, this dry spell is about to end.   The dead woman is Ana Fortez, a Chicana whose death was originally classified as terminal food poisoning brought on...