Mike Hammer Books in Order

Beginning at a twenty-first-century funeral then flashing back to the summer of 1973, Hammer accompanies Velda to Long Island to watch over her teenage sister, Mikki. When drugs enter the picture and Mikki is targeted, Hammer wages war on the dealers, knowing the final reckoning still lies ahead.

In 1964 a hit and run nearly kills Velda’s mother and quietly reveals that Velda’s father is not who she believed. Hammer and Velda travel to Arizona’s Dreamland Park, a retirement haven for ex-lawmen guarding criminals in Witness Protection, and collide with missing robbery millions and graveyard violence.

Set between *Kiss Me, Deadly* and *The Girl Hunters*, Hammer reels from Velda’s disappearance when an old bootlegger friend is murdered. To avenge him, Hammer hunts for a secret ledger packed with the names of corrupt officials, drawing fire from mobsters and power brokers who all want it.

Witnessing a Wall Street hotshot mowed down by a speeding red sports car, Hammer is hired by the victim’s broker father to find the driver. What looks like a hit and run leads to a series of bizarre murders tied to a forbidden martial-arts technique and a killer hiding in plain sight.

Hammer is hired by a New York senator and the senator’s sharp, charismatic wife to stop a blackmailer who threatens a White House bid. As suspects die one by one, he finds himself neck-deep in political secrets, bedroom scandals, and a plot that goes far beyond a single kompromat tape.

In this “lost” first Mike Hammer case, the young PI hops a freight to the mill town of Killington and is promptly accused of rape and murder. A powerful senator’s beautiful daughter gives him an alibi at a price, and Hammer digs into the local corruption that made him a convenient suspect.

A midnight walk by the Hudson brings Hammer face to face with a partial corpse drifting on an ice floe. The dead man was a former cop turned butler to a wealthy family now beset by suspicious deaths, and Hammer must sort through heirs who all have good reasons to kill.

A hired gun bursts into Hammer’s office and nearly puts him in the ground, then a newsstand vendor takes a bullet meant for him. While hunting whoever signed the contract, Hammer is hired to guard a producer’s glamorous fiancée, only to stumble into another deadly kidnapping attempt.

This collection gathers eight Mike Hammer stories completed from Spillane’s drafts, beginning with a string of “accidents” that nearly kill him. The cases range from subway platform brawls to mob vendettas, showing Hammer at different ages but always ready to finish what someone else started.

Velda has vanished from Hammer’s life, and he is coming off a four-month bender when an ex-vice cop she once worked with turns up murdered. Learning that Velda is now on the arm of a Miami gangster, Hammer heads south to find out why she walked away and who wants her dead.

As Hammer and Velda finally plan their wedding, an assassin’s bullet nearly kills him outside his office. At the same time a serial killer of cops is about to walk free and everyone suspects Hammer knows where billions in hidden Mafia cash are stashed, painting a massive target on his back.

Acting as security for a controversial anti-Communist politician, Hammer is snatched off the streets and hustled behind the Iron Curtain. Imprisoned, interrogated, and written off as a dead man, he has to fight his way out of Soviet captivity and untangle the political game that put him there.

Driving upstate, Hammer spots a dog guarding something off the road and finds a mangled corpse with only a single hand intact. Teaming with an ambitious young reporter who soon vanishes, he uncovers grave robberies and a monstrous killing method that even he has never seen before.

On a supposed beach vacation with Velda, Hammer crosses paths with a crooked small-town cop and a missing party girl. When the woman turns up naked and dead on a statue in the town square, he digs into illegal gambling, mob money, and local officials with plenty to hide.

Set in the swingin’ sixties, Hammer is just back from a near-fatal run-in with the mob when he stops a gang mugging a young hospital messenger. The kid was carrying lifesaving drugs, and the ambush leads Hammer and Velda into New York’s growing heroin trade and a looming mega shipment.

Recuperating in Florida from a mob shootout, Hammer learns that his old NYPD mentor apparently killed himself. He refuses to believe it and heads home, only to find a murdered woman, Nazi loot in the shadows, and enemies who thought the old cop took his secrets to the grave.

On the eve of retirement and marriage to Velda, Hammer stumbles into an attack on two young archaeologists carrying a mysterious giant thigh bone. The relic is tied to biblical legend, Middle Eastern politics, and a terrorist plot that forces Hammer back into bloody action.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.