Showing results by publisher "Skyboat Media" in Crime Fiction

Matt Helm is on vacation in Mexico with nothing on his mind except fishing when some joker tries to shoot him in the back. Naturally, it was no accident - when secret agents get shot at, it never is. So Helm has to go back to work. At least there's a bonus in the form of his boss' beautiful daughter, a playmate in peril.

A quiet mission of assassination is no sweat for legendary agent Matt Helm - until a shapely foreign agent he never got around to finishing off lures him into a strange trek in the wilds of Northern Mexico. And when a Russian missile is smuggled out of Cuba, it falls into the hands of a political fanatic much too close to home.

When Matt Helm is dispatched to Los Angeles to investigate the shooting of an agent, it wasn't just an assignment - it was personal. To get the answers he wants means run-ins with two-bit hoods, a trio of beautiful women, a bunch of drug traffickers, and his old friend Mr. Soo, whose government has ideas about polluting America to death.

Sierra Kane—who has bounced from one foster family to another—faces an uncertain future when she receives an unapplied-for scholarship to Barnard College specifically designed for orphans whose academic records are merely above average. A second unexpected boon comes her way when another recipient of that somewhat mysterious scholarship offers her a part-time courier job. Soon, Sierra is caught up in a whirl of espionage and murder, with a new boyfriend who may or may not be part of a plot, a college mentor with a possible agenda of her own, and an FBI agent who rebuffs Sierra’s plea for help.

The onetime world-class thief Nolan - now happily gone straight with his own restaurant/nightclub - whisks his longtime lover Sherry off to Vegas for a trip to a wedding chapel and a honeymoon stay. But an eye-in-the-sky security cam at a casino spots Nolan, whose past catches up with him when he’s thought to be casing the joint. An old “friend” sees Nolan as the perfect patsy for a scheme to heist the weekly skim haul....

On a bleak and lonely heath in northern Scotland, the body of an agent sent to complete a tricky mission is recovered. He had died of bubonic plague. It's up to Matt Helm to take it from there. Somewhere among the desolate Scottish moors is a half-crazed scientific genius who could devastate entire populations with one hideous, raging plague.

It starts with a few near-accidents: A car almost swipes Mike Hammer when he’s crossing the street. A junkie robs the notoriously hardboiled detective at knifepoint. A fight on a subway platform comes close to pushing him in front of a train. While any one of these could be a coincidence, together they make a conspiracy—one that Hammer will have to end in order to survive. And when it comes to finishing something—or someone—nobody does it better than Hammer.

An escapee from a Spanish prison hunts for his best friend's killer in New York. For more than a year, Kit McKittrick languishes in a Fascist prison, his days spent in darkness and his nights tortured by fear of his limping jailer, whose name he never learns. He escapes Spain with the help of Louie Lepetino, a childhood friend who came with him to fight on behalf of the Republican cause.

Far out in the Pacific, among the sunny islands of Hawaii, a dark, venomous plot is engineered by a rogue agent, an angel-faced man called the Monk, who has a special fondness for high explosives. His target is an American troopship with 3,000 US soldiers scheduled to blow sky high - unless Matt Helm can stop him. But first Helm has to trust the beautiful stranger who claims to be his sister-in-law and insists that his former "wife" had just willed him half a million dollars.

Where does a hit man draw the line? With a controversial presidential election just weeks away, Quarry is hired to carry out a rare political assignment: kill the Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd, a passionate civil rights crusader and campaigner for the underdog candidate. But when a hate group out of Ferguson, Missouri, turns out to be gunning for the same target, Quarry starts to wonder just who it is he's working for.

Nolan was still alive; his wounds healed and his money was safe - all $800,000 of it. It was Nolan’s birthday, and he was sitting happy. Until Planner was killed. Planner was an eccentric antique dealer; Planner had the $800,000 in his safe. But now he was dead, and the money was gone. Caught up in the sizzling crossfire of double-dealing, danger, and death, Nolan was up against the “Family” again.

Matt Helm is unexpectedly rich, and he doesn’t like it. Twenty thousand mysterious dollars appear in his bank account, but this is no time for celebration. Another secret agent with an unexplained surplus is murdered, and Helm figures he better work out who his “benefactor” is before he becomes the next target.

On a train from Los Angeles to Chicago, Kitten learns that Viv is planning to offer her roommate a part that was meant for her. If she lets him betray her, her career will be over. But fight for the part and she will be fighting for her life as well.

Crime fiction readers know Quarry - the ruthless killer for hire from Max Allan Collins' acclaimed novels - but where did Quarry's story start? For first time ever, the best-selling author of Road to Perdition takes us back to the beginning, revealing the never-before-told story of Quarry's first job: infiltrating a college campus and eliminating a professor whose affair with one of his beautiful young students is the least of his sins.

In Rusty Santoro's neighborhood, the kids carry knives, chains, bricks, and broken glass. And when they fight, they fight dirty, leaving the streets littered with the bodies of the injured and the dead. Rusty wants out - but you can't just walk away from a New York street gang. And his decision may leave his family to pay a terrible price.

It was a double mission this time: First, to terminate a top-notch enemy agent. Second, to locate the missing fiancee of a Texas oil millionaire, lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Somehow these two cases were connected, but it wasn't clear how until more high-profile types disappeared. They weren't dead, just part of a deadly little game....

First there was The Last Quarry, then there was The First Quarry - now look who's caught in the middle.

The enigmatic hit man Quarry - star of seven celebrated novels and an award-winning feature film (The Last Lullaby) - is back in this violent, steamy tale of warring crime families. When two godfathers set out to bump each other off, guess who winds up with both contracts….

Mike Hammer is summoned to a meeting with Jamie Winters, a US senator from New York, and Jamie's lovely, very smart wife, Nicole, considered by many to be the power behind the throne. Winters is being blackmailed, and Hammer is given a list of suspects who may be behind the threats to the senator's career. But when the suspects begin to drop like flies, Hammer realizes there is more to this case than just a salacious tape.

Memphis, 1975. "Raunchy" doesn't begin to describe Max Climer's magazine, Climax, or his all-hours strip club, or his planned video empire. And evangelists, feminists, and local watchdog groups all want him out of business. But someone wants more than that, and has hired a killer to end Max's career permanently. Only another hit man - the ruthless professional known as Quarry - can keep Climer from becoming a casualty in the Sexual Revolution.

Quarry, star of 13 previous novels, a comic book, and the acclaimed Cinemax TV series, returns in an all-new assignment that takes the hitman's hitman into uncharted territory, when he finds out that for the first time someone has taken out a hit on him. And is the mysterious killer assigned to hit the hitman someone from Quarry's past? Maybe even a past lover?