To save a fellow cop, a detective is asked to free a hardened thug For most of his life, Pop Holland has carried a .38 revolver. This afternoon, when he retired from the San Francisco police department, he said goodbye to the gun forever. But when he steps into his car on the way to his retirement party, he feels the familiar shape of a .38 pressed to his neck. The gun cuts into his skin, and blood runs down his back. Another man gets into the car, handcuffs Holland's hands and feet, and takes him into the night. A half hour later, homicide lieutenant James Reardon sips cognac, waiting for Pop to arrive at the party. The phone rings, and the kidnappers whisper the news: They have Pop, and he will be dead by morning if Reardon disobeys their instructions. They are willing trade Holland for one of their own, a criminal who deserves to spend the rest of his life behind bars. To save one life, Reardon must contemplate putting countless others at risk.

Lieutenant James Reardon hunts for a gang of killers terrorizing San Francisco's banks The men enter the Jerold Avenue branch of the Farmers & Mercantile Bank wearing matching suits, hats, and plastic masks. They demand cooperation, and their machine guns ensure that they get it. Less than three minutes after they enter, they leave, their bags bulging with the shipyard payroll. A passing cop tries to stop them, emptying his revolver as they peel away, and catches a bullet in the heart for his trouble. This is the gang's first job in San Francisco, and it has been baptized with blood. Taking the criminals down falls to homicide lieutenant James Reardon, who has never encountered such determined thieves. The gunmen leave no trace behind, but witness testimonies suggest there may have been an inside man. To break up the gang, Reardon will have to follow them across the country, and put his neck on the line.

To keep his wife in furs, a smuggler sneaks a painting across the Spanish frontierIt is 1948, and few in Belgium live comfortably enough to haggle over payment—particularly those who make their living outside the law. Kek Huuygens is an exception. As far as his wife knows, this dapper gentleman is an art appraiser who moves in the finest circles. But although Kek knows all there is to know about art, he does not appraise it. He moves it—from one thief to another. Kek is the finest smuggler in Europe, and he charges accordingly. After all, his wife has expensive taste. A miniature masterpiece by the Dutchman Frans Hals has gone missing from Sotheby's. Kek has twenty-four hours to move it from Brussels to Madrid, avoiding all the police of Western Europe and a murderous thief who feels he has been double crossed. The job will make him a fortune—if he survives long enough to collect it.

A quartet of killings threaten to derail Lieutenant James Reardon's relationship—and end his life Jan has been dating James Reardon long enough to know that she wants to be with him forever, but she will not marry him as long as he's a cop. She has spent too many nights lying awake, afraid that this will be the case that gets him killed, and she cannot make that her whole life. But she and Reardon both know that death is the only thing that could make him take off his badge—and for this hard-boiled San Francisco detective, death may come sooner than he thinks. It starts with a stabbing in the Embarcadero. A particularly sleazy bartender has gotten knifed in the gut, and he is dead before the cops arrive. Three more killings follow, and each time the victim is one of the city's worst criminals. Is it a vendetta, or a vigilante? Reardon will risk his life to find out.

This is the delightful sequel to the equally delightful The Murder League, which introduced Carruthers, Simpson and Briggs, three charming rogues, who formed their own version of Murder, Inc. and almost got away with it. In Rub-A-Dub-Dub, the three erstwhile scribes have come into a small fortune of questionable source but of unquestionable legality. They decide to take a sea voyage to calm their steel-like nerves. Sir Percival Pugh, Q.C., that arch-criminal lawyer, who defended them once before, takes the trip as well—and a good thing too. In no time at all, cherubic little Carruthers has fallen prey to one of the oldest confidence games going. He is accused of raping Mrs. Mazie Carpenter in her stateroom. Mrs. Carpenter is an American doll (and card sharp) and eminently rapable. Carruthers is delighted with the charge—as would any septuagenarian be—but when Mrs. Carpenter is most foully murdered and that mite of a man, Briggs, is accused of the deed, the joke is over. Sir Percival steps in and, once again, gets them out of hot water. He also, of course, nails the real culprit in the most outlandish coroner’s inquest ever held on land or sea.

To stop a crime wave, a San Francisco cop investigates a ring of smugglers Homicide lieutenant James Reardon is raising a martini to his lips when the call comes in from headquarters. He is late for a meeting and the chief is furious. The cocktail, and Reardon's girlfriend, will have to wait. The meeting is a waste of time—a federal agent repeating platitudes about the dangers of drug smuggling—and Reardon is grateful when a call comes in on the radio, requesting his presence at the scene of a fatal traffic accident. He assumes it will be routine, but Lieutenant Reardon is in for an evening of agony. The driver claims that he was only going fifteen miles an hour when the victim stepped off the curb. Reardon doesn't buy it. And when he learns the dead man had just gotten off a ship from Southeast Asia, he realizes that the federal agent was right: Smuggling is a murderous business.

A lawyer agrees to defend an ex-baseball prospect accused of murderIn 1964, nineteen-year-old Billy Dupaul was on his way to stardom. A modest farm boy with a lightning fastball, he had just signed a record contract with the New York Mets when a single gunshot changed his life forever. Dupaul went down on an attempted murder rap, and the Mets washed their hands of him. Eight years later, the man he was said to have shot drops dead. After eight summers in Attica, Billy is about to be tried for murder.The vice president of the Mets shows surprising interest in the case and hires Hank Ross, one of the toughest defense attorneys in Manhattan, to save the boy from the chair. It's an impossible assignment, and Ross will find the case has more bite than any big-league curve.