Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.

A Manhattan insurance salesman turned killer, makes most antiheroes seem, well, a little genteel. The creepy part about Don Barshter is that he really is just an ordinary insurance salesman until he kills his wife by accident. Opting not to turn himself in, he moves to Buffalo and takes on a new identity: Nathaniel Crowley, ferocious up-and-comer in the New York mob. The new persona fits like a glove. But can he find safety in the skin of another...

"On the border between El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, five lives are about to collide--with fatal results. You'll meet Marty--the professional gambler who rolls the dice on a night with... Meg--the bored divorcee who seeks excitement and finds... Lily--the beautiful hitchhiker lured into a live sex show by... Cassie--the redhead with her own private agenda... and Weaver--the madman, the killer with a straight razor in his pocket, on the run from...

wo decades ago, the producers of the James Bond movies hired legendary crime novelist Donald E. Westlake to come up with a story for the next Bond film. The plot Westlake dreamed up--about a Western businessman seeking revenge after being kicked out of Hong Kong when the island was returned to Chinese rule--had all the elements of a classic Bond adventure, but political concerns kept it from being made. Never one to let a good story go to waste, Westlake...

"Hospitalized after a liaison with another man's wife ends in violence, Paul Cole has just one goal: to rebuild his shattered life. But with his memory damaged, the police hounding him, and no way even to get home, Paul's facing steep odds--and a bleak fate if he fails."--P. [4] of cover.

Cashed out from the NYPD after 24 years, Doak Miller operates as a private eye in steamy small-town Florida, doing jobs for the local police. Like posing as a hit man and wearing a wire to incriminate a local wife who's looking to get rid of her husband. But when he sees the wife, when he looks into her deep blue eyes ... He falls-- and falls hard. Soon he's working with her, against his employer, plotting a devious plan that could get her free from...

"At the end of Yellow Street, in a ruined junkyard of a house, an angry outcast hatches a scheme to take revenge for all the wrongs he has suffered. With the help of three alienated neighborhood kids, he plans to hide razor blades, poison, drugs, and broken glass in Halloween candy and use the deadly treats to maim or kill dozens of innocent children. But as the clock ticks closer to sundown, will one of his helpers--an innocent himself, in his own...

"Private investigators Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, stars of five of Hard Case Crime's most popular novels, return to solve their toughest case yet. Hired to prevent a socialite from poisoning her husband, Donald Lam dreams up an ingenious scheme involving a carton of anchovy paste and a fictitious national ad campaign. But when the whole thing backfires spectacularly and bodies, witnesses, and suspects start piling up, it'll take every ounce of Donald's...

Steven Blitz is stabbed when he tries to stop a man from forcing a woman into his car. He should have died, but when he wakes up in the hospital, he finds himself in an alternate world. He has wealth and a happy family, but he's also in serious trouble.

Join a heart-racing road trip across 1970s America as two cousins make the heist of their lives and must avoid the cops and criminals hot on their tails. It's the summer of '74...Richard Nixon has resigned from office, CB radios are the hot new thing, and in the great state of Texas two cousins hatch a plan to drive $1 million worth of stolen weed to Idaho, where some lunatic is gearing up to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle....