Synopses & Reviews
The men in the tan-and-cream Chrysler came with guns blazing. When Ray Kelly woke up in the hospital, it was a month later, he was missing an eye, and his father was dead.
Then things started to get bad.
From the mind of the incomparable Donald E. Westlake comes a devastating story of betrayal and revenge, an exploration of the limits of family loyalty and how far a man will go when everything he loves is taken from him.
Review
"My personal favorite of [Westlake's] hard-boiled period and, to my mind, the first book in which he found a voice that was uniquely his." Lawrence Block, author of All the Flowers Are Dying and Grifter's Game
Review
"Westlake is always original." Elmore Leonard, bestselling author of Get Shorty and Killshot
Review
"A novel that grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go." San Diego Union-Tribune
Review
"Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible." Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
From the mind of the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster comes a devastating story of betrayal and revenge, never before published in the U.S., that explores the limits of family loyalty and how far a man will go when everything he loves is taken from him.
Synopsis
First U.S. publication in more than 40 years. (First paperback publication in the U.S. ever!)
Synopsis
Ray Kelly takes revenge on the mobsters who murdered his father and brother.
About the Author
Donald E. Westlake is widely regarded as one of the greatest living crime writers. He has won three Edgar Awards and, like Lawrence Block, was named a Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America. Many of his books have been made into movies, including The Hunter, which was filmed twice, first as Point Blank starring Lee Marvin and more recently as Payback starring Mel Gibson. Westlake also wrote the screenplay for The Grifters, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.
Series Description
From World War II through the 1960s, paperback crime novels were one of the fastest-selling categories in book publishing. Millions of readers snapped up hundreds of millions of books by well-known authors like Erle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane, as well as by promising young writers like Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, and Ed McBain. Today, Block, Leonard, and McBain still make the bestseller lists with each new hardcover but the pulp novels that first captured the public's imagination weren't hardcovers. They were paperbacks you could fit in your back pocket, with jaw-dropping cover paintings and bare-knuckled prose that grabbed you by the collar with the first sentence and held you until the last page. No one's published books like that in years.
Until now.
Hard Case Crime is dedicated to reviving the vigor and excitement, the suspense and thrills the sheer entertainment of the golden age of paperback crime novels, both by bringing back into print the best work of the pulp era and by introducing readers to new work by some of today's most powerful writers and artists. Determined detectives and dangerous women...fortune hunters and vengeance seekers...ingenious criminals and men on the run for their lives...Hard Case Crime novels offer everything you want from a great story, all in handsome and affordable mass-market editions.