"It's everyday business when Wattles, the San Fernando Valley's top "executive crook," sets up a hit. He establishes a chain of criminals to pass along the instructions and the money, thereby ensuring that the hitter doesn't know who hired him. Then one day Wattles finds his office safe open and a single item missing: the piece of paper on which he has written the names of the crooks in the chain. When people associated with the chain begin to pop...

"Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender has a rule about never taking a job that pays too well--in the criminal underworld, if someone is offering you more money than a job is worth, someone is going to end up dead. But he's bending his rule this one time because he and his girlfriend, Ronnie, are in desperate need of cash so they can hire a top-notch kidnapper to snatch Ronnie's two-year-old son back from her evil ex. The whole thing is pretty complicated,...

From the creator of HBO's Bored to Death, a deliciously noir novel about idiosyncratic private detective Happy Doll and his quest to help a dying friend in a sun-blinded Los Angeles as "quirky, edgy, charming, funny and serious" as its protagonist (Lee Child). Happy Doll is a charming, if occasionally inexpert, private detective living just one sheer cliff drop beneath the Hollywood sign with his beloved half-Chihuahua half-Terrier, George. A veteran...

"Two young people with an entangled history collide while both working undercover at a Hollywood tycoon's lush California estate"--

In this collection of Chandler's four later novels, "The Lady in the Lake" follows Marlowe out of his natural habitat, into the mountains of L.A. and deep into trouble. In "The Little Sister, " he uncovers a little blackmail, a lot of drugs, and more murder. In "The Long Goodbye, " a war-scarred drunk, his nymphomaniac wife, and Marlowe are on the run from a psychotic gangster. In "Playback, " there is a well-endowed redhead, murder and, of course,...