Book Mail – Hard Case Crime

For those of you that haven’t seen my growing collection on Instagram, I’m a huge fan of the Hard Case Crime series. The stories, the authors, the cover art, the noir elements. Basically everything.

For a while I was actively collecting them, but then finishing my Stephen King collection came first. Now that it’s complete, I’m beginning to focus more on the HCC books again. Based on my list – I love making lists – I only have 20 left!

Yesterday, I received these three beauties in the mail. Here are their synopses:

 

361 – Donald E. Westlake

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.

 

The Gutter and the Grave – Ed McBain

Detective Matt Cordell was happily married once, and gainfully employed, and sober. But that was before he caught his wife cheating on him with one of his operatives and took it out on the man with the butt end of a .45.

Now Matt makes his home on the streets of New York and his only companions are the city’s bartenders. But trouble still knows how to find him, and when Johnny Bridges shows up from the old neighborhood, begging for Matt’s help, Cordell finds himself drawn into a case full of beautiful women and bloody murder. It’s just like the old days – only this time, when the beatings come, he may wind up on the receiving end…  

 

Forever and a Death – Donald E. Westlake

A formerly rich businessman thrown out of Hong Kong when the Chinese took over from the British decides to fix his dire financial problems and take revenge on the Chinese by tunneling under Hong Kong’s bank vaults and stealing all their gold, then using a doomsday device to set off a “soliton wave” that will turn the ground to sludge, causing the whole city to collapse. Only the engineer on his staff who designed the soliton wave technology (intending it for good purposes, to help with construction projects) can stop him, working together with a beautiful young environmental activist who gets caught up in one of the soliton tests and nearly killed. From the deck of a yacht near the Great Barrier Reef to Australia and Singapore and finally Hong Kong itself, it’s a deadly game of cat-and-mouse as our heroes first struggle to escape the villain’s clutches and then thwart his insanely destructive plan.

 

I just love the pulp fiction goodness that is Hard Case Crime! Have you read any of these, or any from the series (Joyland, Colorado Kid?)

–Jess