Lawrence Block

John Keller is everyone's favorite hit man: a new kind of hero for a new, uncertain age. He's cool. Reliable. A real pro: the hit man's hit man. The inconvenient wife, the aging sports star, the business partner, the retiree with a substantial legacy. He's taken care of them all, quietly and efficiently. Keller's got a code of honor, though he'd never call it that. And he keeps the job strictly business. "What happens is you wind up thinking of...

While robbing an apartment, Bernie Rhodenbarr, the New York bookseller and burglar, stumbles on the trail of a treasure belonging to the deposed monarch of an Eastern European country. Problem is, others are after it too. By the author of The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams.

Framed for a high-profile murder that he did not commit, contract hit man John Keller flees for his life and becomes increasingly suspicious about his handler's ominous unresponsiveness.

Burglar Bernie Rodenbarr and his lesbian sidekick Carolyn Kaiser break into houses, apartments and even a museum, in a madcap adventure replete with American Colonial silver, an F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscript, a priceless portrait, a remarkable array of buttons -- and a murder that needs to be solved.

"After Ed Wright's wife suddenly dies, something seems wrong with him. Although he appears suicidal, he lets a policeman talk him out of jumping from a bridge. Then he tells a psychiatrist he's swallowed a deadly dose of sleeping pills -- just in time to have his stomach pumped. But when he buys a shotgun and shells, the story takes a completely unexpected turn." -- container.

In this dazzlingly constructed novel, Lawrence Block reveals the secret at the heart of the Big Apple. His glorious metropolis is really a small town, filled with men and women from all walks of life whose aspirations, fears, disappointments, and triumphs are interconnected by bonds as unbreakable as they are unseen. Pulsating with the lives of its denizens -- bartenders and hookers, power brokers and politicos, cops and secretaries, editors and dreamers...

"When you can't call the cops, you call Scudder. 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." --