Bernie Rhodenbarr is busy running his bookshop, and breaking into houses only when he absolutely needs the money. But how can he resist coming to the aid of a favourite author? Especially when the author's agent is offering their very private correspondence for public sale? The reclusive Gulliver Fairborn may remind you of J D Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. The Paddington, where the action takes place, may put you in mind of New York's legendary Chelsea Hotel, but the case itself and the way Bernie copes with it is pure Lawrence Block, and he's never been better.

Praise for The Burglar in the Library:
'Extremely funny and laid back' Literary Review
'The pace is brisk, the dialogue snappy... and the hook of the Chandler first edition is lovely' TLS
'A homage to the golden age of murder mysteries' Donna Leon

'After 40 years, Hammett has a worthy successor' The Times

In a remote spot outside L.A., a giant truck suddenly plunges in flames off a mountain road at midnight. It looks like an accident, but it isn't. Someone had fastened a bomb under the truck, killing owner-driver, Paul Myers, who was insured for $1 00,000. Crack insurance investigator, Dave Brandstetter is called in to find out what happened and why. Why was Myers hauling in that secluded spot at that hour and for whom. No one wants to answer Dave's questions but then another trucker's death arouses suspicions and a pattern begins to emerge. Gradually Dave's investigation carries him into the mysterious realms of independent trucking and corporate deceit, where smooth PR talk hides a ruthless and widespread deathdealing. Although Dave finally uncovers a murder, his most startling discovery concerns a secret network poisoning all of our lives.

'Nightwork has a high-stakes plot, swift cinematic action and characters with real stuffing in them' Baltimore Sun
'The most exciting and effective writer of the classic private-eye novel working today' L.A. Times

'Jack O'Connell is the future of the dark literary suspense novel.' - James Ellroy

A harrowing and ecstatic descent into a breathtaking netherworld aswirl with the real, the imagined and the absolutely unforgettable. Amid the post industrial decay of Quinsigamond glitters a fabulous jewel - Herzog's Erotic Palace - America's most lavish porn theatre and a gangland laundry for semi-sour cash. But most of all, Herzog's is the place where dreamers meet and seductive nightmares find their dazzling realisation. For the obsessed grunge auteur, the heartsick crime king, the apocalyptic tele-evangelist and the young woman intent on a capturing a shrouded past and an onrushing future within a camera's lens, The Skin Paiace will reveal all secrets, in a script fraught with danger and feverish transformation.

Praise for the books of Jack O'Connell:
Word Made Flesh:
'Hyper-real noir. A grotesque romance about genocide, language, bibliomania, doubt, obsession, worms, epidermis and sanctuary!' - Crime Time
Box Nine: 'The most electrifying debut crime novel you are likely to read all year' - GQ
Wireless:
'has a kind of hallucinatory fascination ... amazing in its density, power, richness of detail, humour and irony ... · dazzling piece of work. one of the year's 10 best!'- L.A.Times
The Skin Palace: 'Throws together The Crying of Lot 49 and Atlas Shrugged, refracts the product through a haze of dozens of Hollywood films and comes up with another world as original and microscopically etched as a thumbprint'- Kirkus Reviews

Spenser is back and embroiled in a deceptively dangerous and multi-layered case: someone has been killing racehorses at stables across the south, and the Boston P.I. travels to Georgia to protect the two-year old destined to become the next Secretariat. When Spenser is approached by Walter Clive, president of the Three Fillies Stables, to find out who is threatening his horse Hugger Mugger, he can hardly say no: he's been doing pro bono work for so long his cupboards are just about bare. Disregarding the resentment of the local Georgia law enforcement, Spenser takes the case. Though Clive has hired a separate security firm, he wants someone with Spenser's experience to supervise the operation. Despite the veneer of civility, Spenser encounters tensions beneath the surface southern gentility. The case takes an even more deadly turn when the attacker claims a human victim, and Spenser must revise his impressions of the Three Fillies organization -and watch his own back as well.

"Nobody does it better than Parker" The Sunday Times
"Robert B Parker's Spenser is one of the best private detectives in fiction." The Sunday Telegraph

High Priest of California

"She was leaning against the door. Her smile was a sickly twisted grimace; the sort a prisoner gives a judge when he's asked if he has anything to say before he's sentenced."

Russell Haxby is a ruthless used car salesman obsessed with manipulating and cavorting with married women. In this classic of hard-boiled fiction, Charles Willeford crafts a wry, sardonic tale of hypocrisy, intrigue and lust set in San Francisco in the early fifties. In High Priest of California every sentence masks innuendo, every detail hides a clue, and every used car sale is as outrageous as every seduction.

'The hairiest, ballsiest, hard-boiled ever penned. One continuous orgy of prolonged foreplay!' Dennis McMillan

Wild Wives

"She wasn't wearing much beneath the skirt. In an instant it was all over. Fiercely and abruptly."

Hoke Moseley's boss has dumped fifty 'cold cases', old unsolved homicides, on his desk. His ex-wife has dumped his two teenage daughters on his doorstep. His voluptuous partner, Cuban Ellita Sanchez, has been kicked out of her house for immoral goings-on. The Miami police chief is kicking Hoke out of his house for illegal goings-on. Happily, however, the wanton stepmother of the OD'd teenage junkie wants Hoke in her bed. But that could just turn out to be the biggest shocker of all.

Richard Hudson, an inveterate woman-chaser and gifted used car salesman, possesses a pimp's understanding of the ways in which women (and men) are most vulnerable - and justifies his seductions with a highly perverse logic. By day, he works his crooked car lot with much success. By night, he returns home to a family of misfits: an adoring, ageless mother; her washed-up husband, an ex-film director who is twenty years her junior; and a curious teenage stepsister ripe for corruption.
One day Richard is seized by a feeling of terror and revulsion; he realizes he's wasting his life in the meaningless pursuit of money. His only hope, he decides, is to abandon the used-car game and try his hand at something creative - an ambitious and risk- laden film project that will "tie up in a single package his reason for existing." The fact that he has no experience in the arts means little to Richard. "Experts" are enlisted, and like a ringleader engineering a crime, he moves forward with a volatile and unyielding energy.
Richard completes his cherished project. But forces beyond his control swiftly reject and destroy it. As a result, the enraged and humiliated used-car salesman goes on a bender for the ages drinking his way through the underbelly of Los Angeles and exacting a monstrous revenge on all who have crossed him.

The Woman Chaser has been filmed by Robinson Devor, starring Patrick Warburton and was a big hit at NY and Sundance Film Festivals. It will be released in the UK around time of publication.

"She was leaning against the door. Her smile was a sickly twisted grimace; the sort a prisoner gives a judge when he's asked if he has anything to say before he's sentenced."

Russell Haxby is a ruthless used car salesman obsessed with manipulating and cavorting with married women. In this classic of Hard-boiled fiction, Charles Willeford crafts a wry, sardonic tale of hypocrisy, intrigue and lust set in San Francisco in the early fifties. In High Priest of California every sentence masks innuendo, every detail hides a clue, and every used car sale is as outrageous as every seduction.

"The hairiest, ballsiest, hard-boiled ever penned. One continuous orgy of prolonged foreplay!" - Dennis McMillan

Born January 2, 1919, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Willeford spent most of his formative years in boarding schools and with his grandmother, who took him in when he was `eight. But he left in his early teens when it became clear to him that she couldn't support them both and became a hobo and drifter. At sixteen he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was subsequently stationed in the Philippines, a random act that became a twenty-year career. WWII found him in the cavalry as a tank commander with the 10th Armored Division in Europe, resulting in a clutch of medals (Silver Star, Bronze Star, a couple of Purple Hearts, and the Luxembourg Croix de Guerre), shrapnel wounds and a wealth of human experience that he later drew on for his novels: "A good half of the men you deal with in the Army are psychopaths. There's a pretty hefty overlap between the military population and the prison population, so I knew plenty of guys like Junior in Miami Blues and Troy in Sideswipe."