Albert Platt is a rotten man. Bred in the rough parts of Brooklyn, he made his name as a killer and has built a fortune from gambling, loan sharking, and the other pastimes of a standard thug. His latest gambit? Buying banks, robbing them, and collecting the insurance. He's a hard man, and no one ever stood in his way until he brushed up against Eddie Manso.Manso is no ordinary veteran. He and four other commandos, battle-hardened in the jungles of Laos, have found that the civilia...

Rejected by the CIA, an ex-commando fresh from the jungles of Vietnam attempts to retire to a jungle island but is lured back into action with an offer of unfathomable profit and unlimited danger.Do nothing. That's what Paul Kavanagh wants to do—absolutely nothing. Ten years of jungle combat have left him numb to mankind, and the only way he seems to keep from hurting people is to stay as far away as he can. He flees to an isolated patch of Caribbean sand, a paradise built for one....

What if our financial system were organized to the benefit of the many rather than simply empowering the few?Robert Hockett and Fred Block argue that an entirely different financial system is both desirable and possible. They outline concrete steps that could get us there. Financial systems move the worlds savings from investment to investment, chasing the highest rates of return. They run on profit. But what if investment went to the enterprises or institutions th...

Virtually everyone—left, right, and center—believes that capitalist economies are autonomous, coherent, and regulated by their own internal laws. This view is an illusion. The reality is that economies organized around the pursuit of private profit are contradictory, incoherent, and heavily shaped by politics and governmental action. But the illusion remains hugely consequential because it has been embraced by political and economic elites who are convinced that they are powerless to chang...

What is it about free-market ideas that give them tenacious staying power in the face of such manifest failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality, and the severe financial crises that have stressed Western economies over the past forty years? Fred Block and Margaret Somers extend the work of the great political economist Karl Polanyi to explain why these ideas have revived from disrepute in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, to become the dominant economic ide...

The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression has generated a fundamental re-evaluation of the free-market policies that have dominated American politics for three decades. State of Innovation brings together critical essays looking at the 'innovation industry' in the context of the current crisis. The book shows how government programs and policies have underpinned technological innovation in the US economy over the last four decades, despite the strength of 'free market' political...

A missing person case brings private eye Roy Markham to the remote winter-bound college town of Cliff's End, New Hampshire. But what began as a routine investigation quickly becomes dark and dangerous. Six pornographic photos and a tidy little blackmail scheme result in a brutal and baffling murder, and no one is safe—especially Markham himself.

Anita Carbone was a good girl—and it bored her. That’s why she took the long subway ride down to Greenwich Village, home of the Beats and the stoners, home to every kind of misfit and dropout and free spirit you could imagine. It was where she met Joe Milani, the troubled young war veteran with the gentle touch. But it was also where she met his drug-dealing roommate—a man whose unnatural appetites led to murder …

There were five of them, each prepared to kill, each with his own reasons for accepting what might well be a suicide mission. The pay? $20,000 apiece. The mission? Find a way into Cuba and kill Castro. This breathtaking thriller, originally published the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis under a pen name Lawrence Block never used before or since, is the rarest of Block's books—and still a work of chilling relevance all these years later, with Castro and Cuba once again commanding headli...

It was all too frighteningly familiar. For the second time in his life, Alex Penn wakes up in an alcoholic daze in a cheap hotel room off Times Square and finds himself lying next to the savagely mutilated body of a young woman. After the first death, he was convicted of murder and imprisoned, then released on a technicality. But this time he has to find out what happened during the blackout and why, before the police do.

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 …

Con man Joe Marlin was used to scoring easy cash off beautiful women. But that was before he met Mona Brassard and found himself facing the most dangerous con of his career, one that will leave him either a killer—or a corpse.