Tormented by the slaying of the hooker who turned to him for help just before her death, cop-turned-private eye Matthew Scudder begins an investigation into the woman's past that reveals secrets that could be deadly for him.

"Already at work on two dangerous cases, Matthew Scudder, the down-and-out, hard-drinking ex-cop, becomes personally involved when the wife of a friend is brutally murdered." --

When ex-policeman and recovering alcoholic Matthew Scudder is stalked by a psychotic killer who murders, one by one, Scudders' friends and acquaintances, his fate hinges on the survival of a glamorous call girl.

The pretty young prostitute is dead. Her alleged murderer-a minister's son-hanged himself in his jail cell. The case is closed. But the dead girl's father has come to Matthew Scudder for answers, sending the unlicensed private investigator in search of terrible truths about a life that was lived and lost in a sordid world of perversion and pleasures.

A deranged derelict, a crazed Vietnam vet, has been arrested for gunning down successful young lawyer Glenn Holtzmann at a corner phone booth on Eleventh Avenue -- and the suspect's brother wants P.I. Matthew Scudder to prove the madman innocent. But Scudder's curiosity and dedication are leading him to dark, unexplored places in his own heart...and to passions and secrets that could destroy everything be loves.

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....

Matthew Scudder, ex-cop, ex-alcoholic, and unlicensed private detective, must draw on all his skills and imagination to find the vicious killer responsible for the robbery and murders of a wealthy couple in an Upper West Side brownstone.

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's accused 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.

Lawrence Block's 17 Matthew Scudder novels have won the hearts of readers throughout the world. But Scudder has starred in short fiction as well, and it's all here, from a pair of late-70s novelettes (Out the Window and A Candle for the Bag Lady) through By the Dawn's Early Light (Edgar) and The Merciful Angel of Death (Shamus), all the way to One Last Night at Grogan's, a moving and elegiac story never before published. It was short fiction that...