Ocean State Libraries

FEATURING THE CHARACTER THAT INSPIRED THE AMC SERIES MONSIEUR SPADE STARRING CLIVE OWEN
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME
Detective Sam Spade is a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. When his partner is killed during a stakeout, he is drawn into the hunt for a fantastic treasure with a dubious provenance—a golden bird encrusted with jewels. Also on the...

Marlowe takes on an assignment from the Sternwood family: the child-woman Carmen, the sultry Vivian, and the ancient General too far past his prime to cope with his daughters' brand of trouble. Stepping in to deal with a case of blackmail, Marlowe follows a trail that leads him into a landscape littered with murder and deception.

Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett's tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing...

Vadassy was just another name on the guest list at the seedy Mediterranean Hotel until he was accused of spying. Then, suddenly, he was on everybody's list.

"Tom Ripley, sent to Italy to coax American playboy Dickie Greenleaf to return home, decides instead that he wants to be exactly like Greenleaf and will stop at nothing to reach his goal."--

The sultry young wife of a diner owner conspires with an aimless drifter to murder her husband

"Black flim-flam man Deke O'Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta's state penitentiary than he's back on the streets working the scam of a lifetime. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement he's counting on the big Harlem rally to produce a big collection for his own private charity. But the take is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everyone wants to get his hands on. As NYPD detectives "Coffin Ed" Johnson and "Grave...

"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...

"A doomed man [sorts] his way among the perverse loyalties of a criminal 'family.'"--Cover.