Max Allan Collins

The assignment was simple: stake out the man's home and kill him. Easy work for a professional like Quarry. But when things go horribly wrong, Quarry finds himself with a new mission: learn who hired him, and make the bastard pay.NOW A CINEMAX TELEVISION SERIES!The longest-running series from Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Perdition, and the first ever to feature a hitman as the main character, the Quarry novels tell the story of a paid assassin with a rebellious streak and an unlikely taste for justice. Once a Marine sniper, Quarry found a new home stateside with a group of contract killers. But some men aren't made for taking orders - and when Quarry strikes off on his own, god help the man on the other side of his nine-millimeter...

1934 Chicago dazzles with fast action and calculating, cold-blooded mean¬ness as private detective Nate Heller combs Chicago's North Side looking for John Dillinger. But things take a turn for the strange when self-aggrandizing G-Man Melvin Purvis shoots down a Dillinger double in front of the Biograph Theater.Full of muscle and oozing Chicago's tough-guy persona to the hilt, Max Allan Collins' Nate Heller is the ultimate private investigator--in the ultimate P.I. town. Heller's undercover search for a farmer's-daughter-turned-gun-moll has him on the dusty Depression backroads of middle America, in the company of Ma Barker and her boys, Baby Face Nelson, Alvin Karpis, and a very-much-still-alive Dillinger--whose outlandish plan to kidnap J. Edgar Hoover in downtown Chicago is one Heller tries to foil. Including appearances by fan dancer Sally Rand, boxer Barney Ross, and Heller's "godfather," Frank Nitti, True Crime is a relentless classic.

Mike Hammer's secretary and partner Velda has walked out on him, and Mike is just surfacing from a four-month bender. But then an old cop turns up murdered, an old cop who once worked with Velda. What's more, Mike's pal Captain Pat Chambers reveals that Velda is in Florida, the moll of gangster and drug runner Nolly Quinn. Hammer hits the road and drives to Miami, where he enlists the help of a horse-faced newspaperman and a local police detective. But can they find Velda in time? And what is the connection between the murdered vice cop in Manhattan, and Mike's ex turning gun moll in Florida?

Quarry is a pro in the murder business. When the man he works for becomes a target himself, Quarry is sent South to remove a traitor in the ranks. But in this wide-open city - with sin everywhere, and betrayal around every corner - Quarry must make the most dangerous choice of his deadly career: who to kill?

Meet the little known and even less understood heroes of police work in Las Vegas -- the forensic investigators. Led by veteran Gil Grissom, the remarkable team assigned to the Criminalistics Bureau's graveyard shift -- including Catherine Willows, Warrick Brown, Nick Stokes, and Sara Sidle -- must combine cutting-edge scientific methods and old-fashioned savvy as they work to untangle the evidence behind the yellow police tape. While Nick and Catherine investigate a newly discovered fifteen-year-old murder, Grissom and the rest of the team must uncover the indentity of a cold-blooded killer -- one whose execution-style, "double-tap" signature has provoked the interest of FBI agent Rick Culpepper.

Hammer accompanies a politician to Moscow, where he is arrested by the KGB and imprisoned. He quickly escapes, but back in the States, the government is none too happy. Russia demands his return to stand charges, and various government agencies are following him. A question dogs Hammer: Why does Russia want him back, and why was he sent to Russia with the senator in the first place?

Mike Hammer's cop pal Captain Pat Chambers is nearing retirement, and Mike and his gorgeous secretary Velda are planning a much overdue marriage. It's a mellow time for America's toughest detective, until an assassin's bullet almost brings him down on his doorstep. Could the attempted hit have anything to do with the release of a serial killer put away by Mike and Pat, decades ago?

Meet the little known and even less understood heroes of police work in Las Vegas -- the forensic investigators. Led by veteran Gil Grissom, the remarkable team assigned to the Criminalistics Bureau's graveyard shift -- including Catherine Willows, Warrick Brown, Nick Stokes, and Sara Sidle -- must combine cutting-edge scienti c methods and old-fashioned savvy as they work to untangle the evidence behind the yellow police tape. SIN CITY If anything happens to me, get this cassette to the police, Lynn Pierce told her friends the night she disappeared without a trace. Pierce seemed to be a devout Christian, devoted wife and mother -- but she left behind a recording of her husband threatening to cut her into little pieces. Jenna Patrick was a professional stripper who said she was trying to get out of the sex trade and into junior college. She wound up strangled to death in a locked room in the back of the club where she worked. What could these two women possibly have had in common -- aside from the fact that they are both victims of homicide? Find out as Grissom, Willows, and the rest of the CSI team track down a sordid trail of secret lives and private dances, from the saintly to the seedier side of Sin City.

This first in a series of novels based on the hit TV show CSI: Miami, details all-new cases that the popular forensic investigators must solve. Lieutenant Horatio Caine leads a crack team of forensic scientists who investigate crimes amid the tropical surroundings and cultural crossroads of Miami. Together, they collect and analyze the evidence to expose the truth and to bring justice to those who often cannot speak for themselves: the victims. Crime boss Kurt Wallace was fighting to hold his vast crime empire together--until a few well-placed bullets ended the struggle. As a host of dangerous "business interests" move in to seize control of Wallace's piece of the Miami underworld, Caine's CSIs must piece together the evidence to discover who was responsible for the crime that all of Miami had a motive to commit.

Quarry doesn't kill just anybody these days. He restricts himself to targeting other hitmen, availing his clients of two services: eliminating the assassins, and finding out who hired them...and then removing that problem as well. So far he's rid of the world of nobody who would be missed. But this time he finds himself zeroing in on the grieving family of a missing cheerleader. Is this the right quarry?

An explosive novel that uncovers new facts about the deadly conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Rigorously researched, Max Allan Collins's Target Lancer is far more truth than fiction. Long before November 22, 1963, Nathan Heller, "P.I. to the Stars," knows that a conspiracy is in the works. Several years earlier, Heller had been involved with the Kennedys, the Mob, and the CIA in the early stages of a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro. Shortly after, Heller's Mafia contact is murdered. After being interrogated by gangsters and contacted by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Heller realizes that he may be the one person who can prevent a devastating political assassination. Only he knows all the players; only he knows why a web of conspirators has targeted the man known to the Secret Service as "Lancer," John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

A never-before-published chapter in Mickey Spillane’s classic series of hard-boiled crime, featuring tough-guy PI Mike Hammer When Mike Hammer and his secretary-turned-lover, Velda, go on vacation to a Long Island beach town, Hammer becomes embroiled in the mystery of a missing New York party girl who lives nearby. When the woman turns up naked—and dead—astride the statue of a horse in the town square, Hammer feels compelled to investigate . . . Shuttling back and forth between Long Island and the city, Hammer finds himself going toe-to-toe with illegal gamblers, corrupt small-town cops, mobsters, and other shady characters who threaten to tear him down.Lady Go Die! is Mickey Spillane's lost 1940s Mike Hammer novel, written between I, the Jury and My Gun Is Quick. Completed by Spillane's friend and literary executor Max Allan Collins, this uncovered gem of hard-boiled crime fiction is finally making its way into print almost 70 years after its inception.

Hammer accompanies a politician to Moscow, where he is arrested by the KGB and imprisoned. He quickly escapes, but back in the States, the government is none too happy. Russia demands his return to stand charges, and various government agencies are following him. A question dogs Hammer: Why does Russia want him back, and why was sent to Russia with the senator in the first place?

When Crane, a graduate journalism student, hears that his fiancée has committed suicide, he’s immediately suspicious and launches into an investigation of her death. The tiny New Jersey town she lived in has seen a rash of suicides lately, with the unlikely coincidence that everyone who has died worked for Kemco, the chemical factory company that fuels the town’s economy. As Crane digs deeper, he encounters Boone, a local woman writing a book about the environmental destruction that has come at the hands of the local chemical giant. The two team up to unravel the conspiracies surrounding the factory—which soon makes them the next targets for those aiming to keep Kemco’s shady dealings under wraps. The pair races to expose the illegal operations poisoning the town and bring Kemco to justice—before either of them becomes the latest in the growing list of “suicides.”

Orson Welles is the bombastic wonder boy of radio and stage. But is he also a murderer? Walter Gibson—creator of pulp superhero the Shadow—travels to New York City to collaborate on a script with Welles, star of the radio show The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The young Welles is a charming but difficult taskmaster who relishes dramatic blowouts with friends, lovers, and colleagues. So when a dead body is found in the studio minutes before the live broadcast of The War of the Worlds, Gibson knows Welles will be the New York Police Department’s number one suspect. Gibson has exactly one hour—while Welles is on the air enacting the infamous hoax story of a Martian invasion—to find the real murderer and clear the radio star’s name. With its brilliant reconstruction of the broadcast that hoodwinked the nation, The War of the Worlds Murder is a paean to radio’s golden age.

Vietnam vet Mallory has been everywhere and done everything—from hippie life to construction work, from covering a reporter’s beat to walking a cop’s—before finally returning to small-town Iowa to try his hand at writing. In between crafting whodunits, he does his part for the community by ferrying hot meals to little old ladies. But then his worlds unexpectedly collide: home invaders murder one of his clients and leave Mallory black-and-blue when he catches them red-handed.The elderly victim is the first fatality in an organized burglary spree sweeping the town, but Mallory fears she may not be the last. And despite the painful cracks in his ribs, nothing can stop him from looking into the killing—not even the local sheriff, or the little blonde from high school days who got away…or even a beating courtesy of the ruthless goon squad that warns Mallory to steer clear.Armed with his ex-cop’s instincts, soldier’s survival skills, and mystery writer’s savvy, Mallory bucks the local law and the love of his life to stop this brutal burglary ring. But writing a mystery can pay well, whereas solving one can pay dearly…

The sixties are dead…and so is Ginnie Mullens. She was many things—free spirit, flower child, entrepreneur, gambler—but first and foremost she was mystery writer Mallory’s friend and confidant since childhood. So Mallory understands when Sheriff Brennan drags him out of bed in the dead of night and leads him to the last place he ever wanted to go: the scene of Ginnie’s last breath. A dead woman clutching the gun that killed her may lead to an official ruling of suicide, but Mallory’s not ruling out murder. Driven by a gaping hole in his heart and a fierce code of honor, he’s willing to risk everything to close the book on this one. Then he’ll throw the book with both hands at whoever wrote Ginnie’s obituary in spilled blood. Once upon a time, Ginnie hurt Mallory deeply, and he wasn’t the only one. But while he finally forgave her, the same can’t be said for the trail of bitter lovers that stretches back to high school. Pounding the pavement from Port City to Iowa City to Vegas—with detours down memory lane along the way— Mallory is forced to pull back the shroud on a life he only thought he knew… and never realized he couldn’t save.

When a passenger is found dead inside a locked cabin aboard the opulent Titanic, it’s a crime worthy of “the Thinking Machine,” the popular fictional investigator who solves mysteries using formidable logic. So who better to crack this real-life case than author Jacques Futrelle, the man behind America’s favorite detective? On board for a romantic getaway with his wife, Futrelle agrees to conduct a stealth inquiry. The list of suspects on the Titanic’s first-class deck is long and includes the brightest lights from high society, each with no shortage of dark secrets. As the mammoth ship speeds across the Atlantic toward its doom, Futrelle races to uncover which passenger has a secret worth killing for—before the murderer strikes again. Set in the days leading up to the luxury liner’s tragic sinking, this historical thriller is a dazzling blend of fact and fiction that will enthrall readers with page-turning revelations and Titanic lore.

The Lusitania’s final voyage is a newsman’s dream. First come the torpedo warnings. Then come the murders… Journalist and mystery writer Willard Huntington Wright boards the Lusitania in pursuit of a hot story. Under the guise of conducting interviews with prominent passengers, his real assignment is to investigate rumors that the luxury liner is carrying illicit cargo for the British war effort against Germany. But Wright, traveling under the pseudonym S.S. Van Dine, isn’t the only passenger with an ulterior motive. Hours after the ship receives torpedo threats, three German stowaways are found murdered. And Wright suspects the deaths are part of a larger conspiracy. Comparing clues and matching wits with Detective Philomina Vance, the pair must solve the murders before the killer can sabotage the entire ship. Recreating the days up to the ship’s fatal encounter with a German U-boat, The Lusitania Murders is historical fiction at its entertaining best.

By day, she’s Mrs. Mallowan, hospital pharmacist. By night, she’s Agatha Christie, queen of crime. Doing her part for the war effort, Agatha dispenses medicine in shell- shocked London. But the world’s most renowned mystery writer is troubled. Compared to the horrors of World War II, her detective novels seem trivial and quaint. When a Jack the Ripper–style murderer strikes, Agatha lobbies her friend, forensics expert Sir Bernard Spilsbury, to take her to the crime scenes. But the killings are far more gruesome than any that her fictional detectives have ever solved. Can a crime writer also be a crime fighter? Joining forces with London’s top investigators, Agatha risks her life to stop the monstrous serial killer. With this ripped-from-the-headlines mystery, author Max Allan Collins presents a blood-stained valentine to the most celebrated author of detective fiction.