On a mild midwestern night in the early 1940s, Johnny Marr leans against a drugstore wall. He’s waiting for Dorothy, his fiancée, and tonight is the last night they’ll be meeting here, for it’s May 31st, and June 1st marks their wedding day. But she’s late, and Johnny soon learns of a horrible accident—an accident involving a group of drunken men, a low-flying charter plane, and an empty liquor bottle. In one short moment Johnny loses all that matters to him and his life is shattered. He vows to take from these men exactly what they took from him. After years of planning, Johnny begins his quest for revenge, and on May 31st of each year—always on May 31st—wives, lovers, and daughters are suddenly no longer safe. From the Trade Paperback edition.

AMERICA'S MASTER OF SUSPENSE...FIRST IN THE DEFINITIVE SERIES OF THIS AMERICAN GENIUS No one knew who she was, where she came from, or why she had entered their lives. All they really knew about her was that she possessed a terrifying beauty-and that each time she appeared, a man died horribly. . . .

A brilliant, lost feminist classic that is equal parts domestic drama and international intrigue. Shirley and Coenraad’s affair has been going on for decades, but her longing for him is as desperate as ever. She is a Toronto housewife; he works for an international organization known only as the Agency. Their rendezvous take place in Tangier, in Hong Kong, in Rome and are arranged by an intricate code based on notes slipped into issues of National Geographic. He recognizes her by her costume: a respectable black dress and string of pearls; his appearance, however, is changeable. But something has happened, the code has been discovered, and Coenraad sends Shirley (who prefers to be known as “Lola Montez”) to Toronto, the last place she wants to go. There the trail leads her through the sites of her impoverished immigrant childhood and sends her, finally, to her own house, where she discards her pearls and trades in her basic black for a dress of vibrant multicolored silk. Helen Weinzweig published her first novel when she was fifty-eight. Basic Black with Pearls, her second, won the Toronto Book Award and has since come to be recognized as a feminist landmark. Here Weinzweig imbues the formal inventiveness of the nouveau roman with psychological poignancy and surprising humor to tell a story of simultaneous dissolution and discovery.

Cornell Woolrich, along with Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, was one of the creators of the noir genre.

Rendezvous Eighteenth marks the emergence of an exciting voice in crime fiction. Ricky Jenks gave up life in the U.S. years ago and is content, if not happy, with his life as a piano player in a small café in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris. He has many friends among the other African-Americans living in Paris and is happily, if casually, involved with a French Muslim woman. But then everything changes. His American life comes crashing down on him when his estranged cousin wants help finding his runaway wife, whom he thinks might have come to Paris, even though he's vague about why. That same night Ricky finds a prostitute dead in his apartment building in Paris's Eighteenth Arrondissment, one of the most multicultural sections of Paris. That these two events could be connected is something he never imagines. This intricate, absorbing thriller is ultimately much more than a suspense novel. Lamar's detailed and vibrant portrait of life in Paris is as much the story of a black man's alienation and redemption-indeed, the story of an entire community searching for a home-as it is a taut thriller about revenge, obsession, and murder.

This 1932 novel brilliantly showcases Cornell Woolrich's transition from modernist to pulp master, as the reader follows a young Manhattan couples' tragic fall from grace.