"Jailed for a joke. It isn't easy going to jail for a practical joke. Of course, this practical joke left 20 cars wrecked on the highway and two politicians' careeers in tatters - so jail is where Harold Künt landed. Now he's just trying to keep a low profile in the Big House. He wants no part of his fellow inmates' plan to use an escape tunnel to rob two banks. But it's too late; he's in it up to his neck. And that neck mayjust wind up in a noose..."...

"Kenan Khoury's wife went out grocery shopping and never came home. Alive, anyway. But because Kenan Khoury buys and sells drugs for a living he can't go to the police for help. He goes to Matthew Scudder instead--an alcoholic ex-cop and unlicensed private eye who will stop at nothing to bring the brutal killers to justice before another innocent woman falls beneath their knives."--page 4 of cover.

On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There's no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues, and it's more than a year before the man is identified.

After former PI Matt Cordell is betrayed by his wife and becomes a bum on the streets of New York City he decides to help an old friend investigate petty larceny at his store, which leads to a series of murders.

Parker's colleague, Alan Grofield, walks out on a plan to steal a brewery's payroll, causing the plan's ringleader to exact revenge.

On a visit to Northern Ireland, newspaper reporter Sam Briscoe meets with a mysterious IRA leader and agrees to deliver an envelope to his supporters in New York City. It's a decision with grave consequences-not just for Briscoe, but for his eleven-year-old daughter as well. Because the bloody Irish conflict is about to come to the streets of New York, and Briscoe is the only man standing in its way.

SO A WAR VET, A PSYCHOPATH, AND A HOT BABE WALK INTO WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK... ...and years later they tell us what Greenwich Village was like in the 1950s. Lawrence Block was on the scene, just starting to find himself as a writer, and A Diet of Treacle was his attempt to get it all down on paper. It was published by a low-rent paperback house, with a tacky title and a pen name, and disappeared from view until Hard Case Crime found it and published...

"Some people will do anything for money. Mavis St. Paul had been a rich man's mistress. Now she was a corpse. And every cop in New York City was hunting for the two-bit punk accused of putting a knife in her. But the punk was innocent. He'd been set up to take the fall by some cutie who was too clever by half. My job? Find that cutie--before the cutie found me."--Back cover

When he buys a passport on the black market to gain entry into post-war Budapest, an American is mistaken for the murdered man the passport belonged to and on the run with the dead man's beautiful assistant.