Max Allan Collins Books in Order

Private eye Mike Hammer vows to avenge the slow, cruel murder of his war buddy Jack Williams by killing the culprit in exactly the same way. His hunt drags him through New York’s nightclubs, clinics, and mob hangouts, where every ally might be a liar.

After Mike Hammer gives a down-on-her-luck redhead enough cash to escape the streets, she turns up dead in an apparent hit and run. Convinced it is murder, Hammer tears into a prostitution and blackmail ring that stretches from waterfront dives to high society.

Hammer wakes up in a hotel room with a hangover, a dead war buddy on the floor, and his own gun as the supposed suicide weapon. Stripped of his licenses, he digs into a modeling agency and blackmail racket that powerful people will kill to protect.

Shaken after a judge calls him a killer, Hammer wanders a rainy Manhattan bridge and stumbles into a woman’s death and a stranger’s murder. The trail leads to Communist cells, political fronts, and a conspiracy that turns his personal crisis into a Cold War battlefield.

In a seedy bar on a stormy night, a desperate man kisses his baby goodbye, walks into the street, and is gunned down. Hammer shoots back, then takes responsibility for the child and launches a relentless hunt for the men behind the killing.

Speeding home from Albany, Hammer almost runs down a terrified hitchhiker, then is run off the road by killers who torture and murder her. His investigation uncovers a tangle of mobsters, spies, and stolen atomic secrets that make this one of his most explosive cases.

Seven years after Velda vanished on a case, Hammer is a drunken derelict pulled off the streets to hear a dying man’s confession: Velda is alive and in deadly danger. To save her, he has to sober up and face a Soviet assassin known only as the Dragon.

Picking up after *The Girl Hunters*, Hammer spirits Velda out of hiding and discovers she has been sheltering a runaway young woman. Protecting the girl from her murderous stepfather throws Hammer and Velda into a decades-old robbery mystery and a hunt for a faceless schemer called the Snake.

A routine bodyguard job turns into a nightmare when the teenage son of Hammer’s wealthy client disappears. The kidnapping ties back to a fourteen-year-old crime and a killer whose warped motives make him one of the most venomous foes Hammer has ever faced.

Hammer hears a child’s scream in the night and finds a terrified boy beside the whipped, murdered body of a model. As similarly brutal killings mount, he dives into fashion houses, hidden clubs, and an underground circle where jaded elites pay to watch women die.

A dying friend’s phone call pulls Hammer into the shabby death of a small-time pickpocket. Under the cheap suit and alleyway violence he uncovers a deeper plot, where political players and faceless bureaucrats are ready to write off innocent lives as acceptable losses.

Hammer walks into his office to find Velda unconscious on the floor, a mobster butchered in his chair, and a note from a killer signed “Penta.” With the DA, FBI, CIA, and the Mafia all crowding in, Hammer has to find out who really owns the corpse on his carpet.

This anthology gathers erotic horror stories where desire, obsession, and the supernatural keep colliding. Yvonne Navarro curates tales that aim for both heat and unease.

Another volume of erotic horror, this collection mixes sensual tension with monsters, danger, and dark twists. It is built for readers who like their horror intimate and unsettling.

Still recovering from bullet wounds and presumed dead by many who knew him, Hammer returns to New York and to an old army buddy on his deathbed. The friend whispers one last secret, pointing Hammer toward a hidden cache of Mafia billions that every hood and fed in town wants.

The second annual anthology of mystery and suspense fiction selects established and emerging writers from American and international publications. Alongside the stories, it contains year-end reports on crime writing and fandom, plus coverage of the 2000 short-story Edgar Awards.