Lawrence Block

After a night out with friends, Matthew Scudder is reminded of an enigmatic case he had while still working as uniformed policeman. The case in question involves the suicide of a devout Catholic man in front of his wife and children... or was it a murder?

Matt Scudder finds himself caught up in a web of deceit and treachery when he comes to the aid of a homeless man charged with the brutal death of a yuppie lawyer. As Matt investigates, he discovers the victim was a federal informant who may have been eliminated as an act of revenge. Private detective Matthew Scudder ventures into the dark and dangerous alleys of Hell's Kitchen to track the killer of a yuppie lawyer.

The ever-randy hero of Lawrence Block's No Score flees New York City for South Carolina, where a job in a whorehouse gives him an opportunity for lots of loving and lots of trouble. Flat broke and sick of freezing to death in New York City, the permanently aroused Chip Harrison hops on a bus to warmer climes, landing in the quiet hamlet of Bordentown, South Carolina. With his usual clumsy charm, the aspiring lecher backs his way into a job running...

Suppose you're Bernie Rhodenbarr. You've got a dream job, running your own cozy secondhand bookstore, complete with Raffles, your caudally challenged cat. It's in Greenwich Village, and your best friend's dog grooming salon is two doors away, and the two of you lunch together and meet for drinks after work. And you've got another way to make a buck. Every once in a while you put your conscience on the shelf and let yourself into someone else's residence,...

There were five of them, each prepared to kill, each with his own reasons for accepting what might well be a suicide mission. The pay? $20,000 apiece. The mission? Find a way into Cuba and kill Castro. This breathtaking thriller, originally published the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis under a pen name Lawrence Block never used before or since, is the rarest of Block's books-and still a work of chilling relevance all these years later, with Castro...

Nine long years have passed since the killer last struck-nine years since eight helpless young women were brutally slaughtered by an icepick-wielding maniac. The trail grew cold, and the book was unofficially closed on a serial killer who stopped killing. But now the "Icepick Prowler" has confessed-but only to seven of the killings. Not only does he deny the eighth but he also has an airtight alibi. Barbara Ettinger's family had almost come to accept...

Sometime in 1953, I knew with unusual certainty what I intended to do with my life. I would become a writer. By the time I was twenty-five, I had published over fifty books. Most of these bore pen names, and for a time I resisted acknowledging my early pseudonymous work. Then, in one astonishing and feverish week in 1994, I recalled those early years in fifty thousand words of memoir. A publisher contracted to bring out my memoir once I'd completed...

The hooker was young, pretty … and dead, butchered in a Greenwich Village apartment. The prime suspect, a minister's son, was also dead, the victim of a jailhouse suicide. The case is closed, as far as the NYPD is concerned. Now the murdered prostitute's father wants it opened again-that's where Matthew Scudder comes in. But this assignment carries the unmistakable stench of sleaze and perversion, luring Scudder into a sordid world of phony religion...

The red-headed homicide detective climbed into the two-door Honda at the corner, threw in the clutch, and detonated a charge of C-4 plastic that obliterated car and detective. Harold Snow, the only witness, remarked: "Someone just blew away the landlady."