Matthew Scudder Series by Lawrence Block
Matthew Scudder #1
The Sins of the Fathers
Lawrence Block
The hooker was young, pretty. . . and dead, butchered in a Greenwich village apartment. The prime suspect, a minister's son, was also dead, the victim of a jailhouse suicide. The case is closed, as far as the NYPD is concerned. Now the murdered prostitute's father wants it opened again-and that's where Matthew Scudder comes in. But this assignment carries the unmistakable stench of sleaze and perversion, luring ex-cop-turned-investigator Scudder into a sordid world of phony religion and murderous lust where children must die for their parents most secret, unspeakable sins.
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Matthew Scudder #2
Time to Murder and Create
Lawrence Block
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.
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Matthew Scudder #3
In the Midst of Death
Lawrence Block
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.
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Matthew Scudder #4
A Stab in the Dark
Lawrence Block
Louis Pinell, the recently apprehended "Icepick Prowler," freely admits to having slain seven young women nine years ago -- but be swears it was a copycat who killed Barbara Ettinger Matthew Scudder believes him. But the trail to Ettinger's true murderer is twisted, dark and dangerous. . . and even colder than the almost decade-old corpse the p. i. is determined to avenge.
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Matthew Scudder #5
Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5
Lawrence Block
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.
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Matthew Scudder #5
Eight Million Ways to Die
Lawrence Block
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.
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Matthew Scudder #6
When the Sacred Ginmill Closes
Lawrence Block
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.
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Matthew Scudder #7
Out on the Cutting Edge
Lawrence Block
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.
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Matthew Scudder #8
A Ticket to the Boneyard
Lawrence Block
The streets of New York are never safe, but the release of James Leo Motley, a psychopath who went down swearing revenge on Matt Scudder on all who knew him, means death is out there looking for a victim. No-one is safe - friends, lovers or just those unfortunate enough to share the same name.
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Matthew Scudder #9
A Dance at the Slaughter House
Lawrence Block
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.
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Matthew Scudder #10
A Walk Among the Tombstones
Lawrence Block
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.
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Matthew Scudder #11
The Devil Knows Youre Dead
Lawrence Block
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.
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Matthew Scudder #12
A Long Line of Dead Men
Lawrence Block
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.
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Matthew Scudder #13
Even the Wicked
Lawrence Block
Matthew Scudder knows that justice is an elusive commodity in the big city, where a harmless man can be shot dead in a public place criminals fly free through holes in a tattered legal system. But now a vigilante is roaming among the millions, executing those he fees deserve to die. He calls himself "The Will of the People"—an ingenious serial killer who announces his specific murderous intentions to the media before carrying through on his threats. A child molester, a Mafia don, a violent anti-abortionist—even the protected and untouchable are being ruthlessly erased by New York's latest celebrity avenger.
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Matthew Scudder #14
Everybody Dies
Lawrence Block
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.
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Matthew Scudder #15
Hope to Die
Lawrence Block
The city caught its collective breath when upscale couple Byrne and Susan Hollander were slaughtered in a brutal home invasion. Now, a few days later, the killers themselves have turned up dead behind the locked door of a Brooklyn hellhole -- one apparently slain by his partner in crime who then took his own life. There's something drawing Matthew Scudder to this case that the cops have quickly and eagerly closed: a nagging suspicion that a third man is involved, a cold, diabolical puppet master who manipulates his two accomplices, then cuts their strings when he's done with them. No one but Scudder even suspects he exists. And his worst fear is that the guy is just getting started . . .
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Matthew Scudder #16
All the Flowers Are Dying
Lawrence Block
"A man in a Virginia prison awaits execution for three hideous murders he swears, in the face of irrefutable evidence, he did not commit. A psychologist who claims to believe the convict spends hours with the man in his death row cell, and ultimately watches in the gallery as the lethal injection is administered. His work completed, the psychologist heads back to New York City to attend to unfinished business. " Meanwhile, Matthew Scudder has just agreed to investigate the ostensibly suspicious online lover of an acquaintance. It seems simple enough. At first. But when people start dying and the victims are increasingly closer to home, it becomes clear that a vicious killer is at work. And the final targets may be Matt and Elaine Scudder.
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Matthew Scudder #17
A Drop of the Hard Stuff
Lawrence Block
"Right up there with Mr. Block's best. . . . A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF keeps us guessing. "--Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal Facing his demons in his first year of sobriety, Matthew Scudder finds himself on the trail of a killer. When Scudder's childhood friend Jack Ellery is murdered, presumably while attempting to atone for past sins, Scudder reluctantly begins his own investigation, with just one lead: Ellery's Alcoholics Anonymous list of people he wronged. One of them may be a killer, but that's not necessarily Scudder's greatest danger. Immersing himself in Ellery's world may lead him right back to the bar stool. In a novel widely celebrated by critics and readers, Lawrence Block circle back to how it all began, reestablishing the Matthew Scudder series as one of the pinnacles of American detective fiction.
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