Matt Scudder is finally leading a comfortable life. The crime rate's down and the stock market's up. Gentrification's prettying-up the old neighborhood. The New York streets don't look so mean anymore. Then all hell breaks loose. Scudder quickly discovers the spruced-up sidewalks are as mean as ever, dark and gritty and stained with blood. He's living in a world where the past is a minefield, the present is a war zone, and the future's an open question. It's a world where nothing is certain and nobody's safe, a random universe where no one's survival can be taken for granted. Not even his own. A world where everybody dies.

The wife of Kheran Khoury, heroin wholesaler, is killed after he haggles over the price of her ransom. With the help of two computer geniuses, a streetwise punk, drug lords and his friend, ex-cop Scudder, they track the killers through the back streets of Brooklyn.

When Yuppie lawyer Glenn Holtzmann sits in his penthouse gazing at the setting sun, he little imagines that within half an hour he will be dead. Everyone believes it to be a clear-cut case, but Scudder isn't convinced that the evidence or the victim are what they seem.

In Manhattan, thirty men have been meeting once a year for years; they form a tontine, a secret, private club, the only purpose of which is to record the passage of time and to give a toast to the joys of life. But when these men start to die at alarming rates, murder rears its ugly head. It's clear someone is determined to kill them all. Hired by one of the members, Matt Scudder, ex-cop and recovering alcoholic, enters the world of privilege, which may as well be on another planet from the world of street hustlers and career criminals he's so familiar with. As the case draws Matt deeper and deeper, he's forced to look at his own life--his work, his loves, his friendships and his destiny.

Strange Embrace started out to be a novel based on Johnny Midnight, a TV series which everyone has long since forgotten.Except, of course, that nothing manages to be forgotten in the Internet Age. I, whose job it was to knock out 50,000 words of Johnny Midnightish prose and dialogue, had forgotten when it ran and who was in it, but Google took no time at all to remind me that the title role was played by Edmund O'Brien, and that the series ran during the first nine months of 1960. And if you want to know more about it, well, Google and Wikipedia are there to enlighten you.I was in New York, newly married, living at 110 West 69th Street. I was writing short stories for crime fiction magazines, erotic novels for Midwood and Nightstand, and fielding assignments that my agent steered in my direction. Two of these were from paperback publishers who had acquired the book rights to a TV drama and wanted to hire someone to write a book.First up...

Nobody knows better than Matthew Scudder how far down a person can sink in this city. A young prostitute named Kim knew it also—and she wanted out. Maybe Kim didn't deserve the life fate had dealt her. She surely didn't deserve her death. The alcoholic ex-cop turned p. i. was supposed to protect her, but someone slashed her to ribbons on a crumbling New York City waterfront pier. Now finding Kim's killer will be Scudder's penance. But there are lethal secrets hiding in the slain hooker's past that are far dirtier than her trade. And there are many ways of dying in this cruel and dangerous town—some quick and brutal . . . and some agonizingly slow.

a Chip Harrison story by the superb Lawrence Block, it’s an affectionate send-up of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe tales, the traditional detective story, and luminaries in the mystery field. Eccentric detective Leo Haig and his assistant, Chip Harrison, take on the bizarre case of a woman who doesn’t object to being murdered

Small-time stoolie, Jake "The Spinner" Jablon, made a lot of new enemies when he switched careers, from informer to blackmailer. And the more "clients, " he figured, the more money - and more people eager to see him dead. So no one is surprised when the pigeon is found floating in the East River with his skull bashed in. And what's worse, no one cares - except Matthew Scudder. The ex-cop-turned-private-eye is no conscientious avenging angel. But he's willing to risk his own life and limb to confront Spinner's most murderously aggressive marks. A job's a job after all - and Scudder's been paid to find a killer - by the victim. . . in advance.

It isn't called Hell's Kitchen for nothing - a gritty landscape of dark doorways and dirty alleys inhabited by crack addicts and the homeless. For Matt Scudder, it's a city gone mad, but a city he can't leave as he's been hired to find missing would-be actress Paula Hoeldtke.

A Dance At The SlaughterhouseIn Matt Scudder's mind, money, power, and position elevate nobody above morality and the law. Now the ex-cop and unlicensed p. i. has been hired to prove that socialite Richard Thurman orchestrated the brutal murder of his beautiful, pregnant wife. During Scudder's hard drinking years, he left a piece of his soul on every seedy corner of the Big Apple. But this case is more depraved and more potentially devastating than anything he experienced while floundering in the urban depths. Because this investigation is leading Scudder on a frightening grand tour of New York's sex-for-sale underworld -- where an innocent young life is simply a commodity to be bought and perverted . . . and then destroyed.

Bad cop Jerry Broadfield didn't make any friends on the force when he volunteered to squeal to an ambitious d. a. about police corruption. Now he'saccused of murdering a call girl. Matthew Scudder doesn't think Broadfield's a killer, but the cops aren't about to help the unlicensed p. i. prove it -- and they may do a lot worse than just get in his way.

These were the dark days for Matthew Scudder. An ex-New York cop, he had drowned his career in booze. Now he was drinking away his life in a succession of seedy establishments that opened early and closed late, reduced to doing paid "favors" for the cronies who gathered with him to worship the bottle. Now, in a sad and lonely place like so many before it, opportunity comes knocking — a chance to help the ginmil's owner recover his stolen doctored financial records; a chance to help out a drinking buddy accused of murdering his wife. But when cases flow together in dangerous and disturbing ways — like the nightmare images in a drunkard's delirium — it's time for Scudder to change his priorities: to staying sober. . . and staying alive.