Block's short stories are intelligent and respectful of the reader yet often take an unexpected turn. He plays fair. If you reread the story, you'll find that he left you little clues about the final destination but didn't connect the dots. Block is a master of the long-form mystery, and this collection proves he's got the short form locked down as well.

You've got a dream job, running your own cozy secondhand bookstore, complete with Raffles, your caudally challenged cat. And you've got another way to make a buck: every once in a while you put your conscience on the shelf and let yourself into someone else's residence, and you leave with more than you came with. You're a burglar, and you know it's wrong, but you love it-until the 21st Century pulls the rug out from under you. All of a sudden the...

SHE WAS EVERY MAN’S DREAM – AND ONE MAN’S NIGHTMARE Johnny Hayden and Doug Rance had a scheme to take real estate entrepreneur Wallace Gunderman for all he was worth. But they needed a girl on the inside to make it work. Enter Evelyn Stone: Gunderman’s secretary, his lover – and his worst enemy. Gunderman had promised to marry her, but never came through. Now she’s ready to make him pay…

Kenan Khoury's wife went out grocery shopping and never came home alive. But because Kenan Khoury buys and sells drugs for a living he can't go to the police for help. He goes to Matthew Scudder instead, an alcoholic ex-cop and unlicensed private eye who will stop at nothing to bring the brutal killers to justice before another innocent woman falls beneath their knives.

After a childhood friend is shot down while attempting to atone for past sins, Scudder is drawn into a murder investigation that threatens to upset his path toward recovery--and get him killed in the process.

When Byrne and Susan Hollander are killed in a brutal home invasion, the whole city catches its collective breath. A few days later the killers turn up dead behind a locked door in Brooklyn. One has killed his partner, then himself. The city sighs with relief. The cops close the case.Matt and Elaine Scudder were in the same room with the Hollanders hours before their deaths. In spite of himself, Scudder is drawn to the Hollander case. The closer he...