Ella Young immigrated to the United States in 1925 at the age of 58, disillusioned by Ireland’s civil war. In America she found a revitalizing natural beauty and a wide circle of friends among the artists and bohemians of the mid-century. Through her stories, beliefs, and poetry, she restored people’s connection with the sacred in nature. She taught that the land holds spirits, that you can talk to a mountain, and that humans are part of the planet, not here to dominate it. This connection...

An amoral young tramp. A beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband. A problem that has only one, grisly solution -- a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve.First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a classic of the roman noir. It established James M. Cain as a major novelist with an unsparing vision of America's bleak underside, and wa...

Grieving widow or black widow?The day Joan Medford buried her husband was a fateful one—because before the day was out she'd meet the two men who would change her life forever. Forced to take a job waitressing to support herself and her child, Joan finds herself caught between the handsome young schemer whose touch she comes to crave and the wealthy older man whose touch repels her…but who otherwise would make a tempting husband number two. It's a classic Cain triangle —br...

Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter.Out of these elements, Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less tha...

Bank robberies should run like clockwork, right? If your name's Parker, you expect nothing less. Until, that is, one of your partners gets too greedy for his own good. The four-way split following a job leaves too small a take for George Uhl, who begins to pick off his fellow hoisters, one by one. The first mistake? He doesn't begin things by putting a bullet in Parker. That means he won't get the chance to make a second. One of the darkest novels in the series, this caper proves the adage...

Master criminal Parker takes another turn for the worse as he tries to recover loot from a heist gone terribly wrong. Parker and two cohorts stole the assets of a bank in transit, but the police heat was so great they could only escape if they left the money behind. Now Parker and his associates plot to reclaim the loot, which they hid in the choir loft of an unused country church. As they implement the plan, people on both sides of the law use the forces at their command to stop Parker an...

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. Firebreak takes Parker to a palatial Montana "hunting lodge" where a dot-com millionaire hides a gallery of stolen old masters—which will fetch Par...

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...

After the bloodbath of Butcher's Moon, the action-filled blowout Parker adventure, Donald Westlake said, "Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone." And for nearly twenty-five years, he stayed away, while readers waited.But nothing bad is truly gone forever, and Parker's as bad as they come. According to Westlake, one day in 1997, "suddenly, he came back from the dead, with a chalky prison pallor"—and the resulting novel,...

When it comes to heists, Parker believes in some cardinal rules. On this job, he breaks two of them: never bring a dame along—especially not one you like—and never, ever, work with amateurs. Nevertheless, with the help of a creep named Billy, and the lure of a classy widow, he agrees to set up a heist of a coin convention. But Billy's a rookie with no idea how to pull off a score, and the lady soon becomes a major distraction. The Rare Coin Score marks the first appearance of Clai...

The good guys in a new African nation were missing a treasury full of diamonds. The nation's corrupt leader had stashed the rocks somewhere in New York City. Now the good guys needed a specialist to get their diamonds back. So they came to the best in the business: Parker. Only the three mysterious tough guys came to Parker, too. They figured three hands filled with .38's could convince him to pass up this international gem game. But leaning on Parker was like pressuring a box of TNT with ...

For two years, Walter Stackhouse has been a faithful and supportive husband to his wife, Clara. But she is distant and neurotic, and Walter finds himself harboring gruesome fantasies about her demise. When Clara’s dead body turns up at the bottom of a cliff in a manner uncannily resembling the recent death of a woman who was murdered by her husband, Walter finds himself under intense scrutiny. He commits several blunders that claim his career and his reputation, cost him his friends, and e...