An ex-con struggles to adjust to life outside prison walls in "one of the great crime novels of the past 30 years" (James Ellroy).After eight years spent locked up, Max has gotten very good at being a prisoner. He knows the guards, the inmates, and how to survive. But the parole board has decided that he has sufficiently reformed, and it's time for him to say goodbye. When Max reaches the outside world, he finds that freedom doesn't make anything e...

"A masterful summation of the hard and brutal life of crime and prison from . . . America's foremost chronicler of prison life." — Los Angeles TimesIn Education of a Felon, the reigning champion of prison novelists finally tells his own story. The son of an alcoholic stagehand father and a Busby Berkeley chorus girl, Bunker was—at seventeen—the youngest inmate ever in San Quentin. His hard-won experiences on L.A.'s meanest streets and in and out of...

" The best novel about armed robbery ever written" from the Reservoir Dogs actor and ex-con author of No Beast So Fierce (James Ellroy).Troy was born in Beverly Hills but raised in the prisons of Southern California. Two days before his parole from reform school, a run-in with a young black tough threatens to derail his release. He prepares to fight, ready to sacrifice freedom to maintain his reputation, but a friend comes to his ...

Six stories from the papers of one of America's finest crime authorsRoger doesn't mean for the preacher and his wife to die. Released less than a year earlier from San Quentin, he's trying to make a living the only way he knows how: theft. His latest heist goes perfectly until his car breaks down. Sirens are closing in when an old black preacher stops to give him a lift. The police at the roadblock kill the elderly couple, but in the eyes of the law it's Roger's fa...

Here is the quintessential story of a young hoodlum's coming of age in post-Depression America, from the undisputed master of the genre."Bunker is a true original of American letters. His books are criminal classics." ―James Ellroy"The best first-person crime novel I've ever read." —Quentin TarantinoAlex Hamilton is young, intelligent, savvy, and independent—but also subject to violent fits of rage. Raised within th...

"Compact, brilliantly detailed" this sixties L. A. noir thriller is "[a] posthumous wild ride from a modern master of crime fiction" ( Publishers Weekly).Ex-con. Author. Actor. Legend. Edward Bunker is one of the acknowledged masters of crime fiction. Written in the late 1960's and discovered after Bunker's death in 2005, Stark is his first and perhaps his most explosive novel ever.1962. Oceanview, California. The girls are beautiful. The do...

In this dark thriller, two inmates become friends in California's San Quentin, a world of violence and paranoia where prisoners struggle to survive.Basis for the film starring Willem Dafoe, Edward Furlong, and Mickey Rourke―directed by Steve Buscemi.Ron Decker is a newbie, a drug dealer whose shot at a short two-year stint in the can is threatened from inside and outside. He's got to keep a spotless record or it's ten to life. But at San Qu...

The basis for the film Straight Time, this compelling novel, first published in 1973 and written by a man who had spent most of his life in prison, is the story of an ex-con’s attempt to negotiate the straight world-and his swan dive back into the paradoxical security of crime.

Stanton Carlisle is smart, good-looking and ambitious. Among the outcasts, freaks and geeks of the Ten-in-One sideshow, he learns that the public is there to be gulled, and he learns how to do it. Amoral and brilliant, he aims for the brighter lights of vaudeville before a much bigger coup faking spiritualism for the rich. But his own dark fears haunt him, and he is not the only one taking advantage of terror and desire. Published in 1946, Nightmare Alley is a noir classic at once a vivid ...

The basis for the third season of the new Sundance TV series Hap and Leonard coming Spring 2018.Full of savage humor, heart-stopping suspense, and a cast of characters so tough they could chew the bumper off a pickup truck, The Two Bear Mambo is classic country noir.In this rollicking, rollercoaster ride of a novel, Hap Collins and Leonard Pine take a break from their day jobs to search for Florida Grange, Leonard's drop-dead gorgeous lawy...

A tense, mesmerizing novel about memory, privacy, fear, and what happens when our past catches up with us.After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it's as though he could disappear and n...

Between Parker's 1961 debut and his return in the late 1990s, the world of crime changed considerably. Now fake IDs and credit cards had to be purchased from specialists; increasingly sophisticated policing made escape and evasion tougher; and, worst of all, money had gone digital—the days of cash-stuffed payroll trucks were long gone.But cash isn't everything, and now Parker's after a fortune in jewels*.* In Flashfire, Parker's in West Palm Beach, competing with a crew th...