Till death do us part...

Marcy Addwatter killed her husband — there's no question about that. Shot him dead in the motel room where he was trysting with a blonde hooker. Shot the hooker, too.

But where the cops might see an open-and-shut case, private eye Michael Tree — Ms. Michael Tree — sees a conspiracy. For Ms. Tree, digging into it could mean digging her own grave...and digging up her own murdered husband's.

Based on the longest-running private-eye comic book series of all time, Deadly Beloved brings you an all-new adventure of the legendary Ms. Tree — the groundbreaking female P.I. who put the "graphic" into graphic novel...

"The wife of a prominent accounting firm executive has just been arrested for the murder of her husband and his afternoon pay-per-playmate, but the Chicago PD have their doubts about the open-and-shut case. It's up to longtime Collins heroine, Ms. Tree, the sexy brunette PI star of his graphic novel series, to clear the forest of red herrings and uncover the conspiracy beneath; of course, her tricky investigation is soon beset by deadly antagonists. Tree slips effortlessly into her first all-prose incarnation, though 'graphic' is not an inaccurate description for this exceptional novel: 'Mike was sprawled on his back... his bare chest puckered with entry wounds and blood pooling beneath him, glistening with neon reflection.' A psychiatrist Tree seeks out (for help with recurring nightmares) provides a framing device that keeps her complex tale unspooling smoothly, and Collins skillfully ties up a multitude of branches into the big, bloody bouquet one would expect from the author of The Road to Perdition. Sharp and satisfying, this is another must-have for fans of the Hard Case Crime imprint." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Violent and volatile and packed with sexuality...classic pulp fiction." USA Today

"Collins' witty, hard-boiled prose would make Raymond Chandler proud." Entertainment Weekly

"As cool as an Eskimo Pie on a hot summer day and as sharp as a Ginsu knife." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

In this first novel to star the heroine of the popular and longest-running private-eye comic book series of all time, Ms. Tree investigates a desperate housewife manipulated into murdering her husband. Soon, however, Ms. Tree discovers the truth about her own husbands brutal murder years earlier.

Author of Road to Perdition, the acclaimed graphic novel that inspired the movie starring Paul Newman and Tom Hanks, and of the multiple-award-winning Nathan Heller series of historical hardboiled mysteries, Max Allan Collins is one of most prolific and popular authors working in the hardboiled field today. He is also a filmmaker whose work includes "Shades of Noir," "Real Time," and the documentary "Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane."