Böcker av Lionel White

TOO YOUNG TO DIE:When Quent gets out of prison, all he wants is to put together another heist. This time it'll be perfect. He certainly doesn't want to have anything to do with women. His ex-wife Pearl cured him of that. But as he puts together a team to pull off a Manhattan diamond job, he meets his driver's girlfriend, Cindy. Cindy is young, not quite 18, but she's streetwise and knows the score. But she's too young for Quent. So it comes as a big surprise to him when he finds himself falling for the girl, even caring what happens to her. It's one of his rules: no women involved in a heist. But for Cindy, he might have to make an exception.THE TIME OF TERROR:He's lost his job. His wife left him, and she took the two kids. He barely has enough money to put gas in his car. Frank Mace is desperate. He decides to stick up a grocery store. But when he sees the young boy alone in the next car, on impulse he takes him instead and leaves a ransom note. Now Frank is wracked with guilt, and afraid to follow through. He's almost too terrified to pick up the ransom money. That's when Barney-bullying old friend, as opportunistic as they come-enters the picture. When Barney finds out what Frank has done, he takes over the situation. And that's when the real trouble begins....

Johnny Clay's plan to rob the Long Island race track was daring and highly original. Johnny, an ex-convict, had spent his prison years thinking through every possible hitch to his scheme until he was sure it could go off like clockwork. His four confederates were not known to the police for they were not professional criminals. They had been picked because they were ordinary nondescript men, all with money problems and a touch of larceny in their hearts. Mike Henty was a bartender at the track and George Peatty a cashier, both essential inside men. Martin Unger, a court stenographer, had put up the initial cash and Randy Kennan, a cop, was to get the money away from the track after Johnny had done the actual robbing. There were in addition three others who were to do a specific jobs for a cash payment. To one of these men fell the assignment of shooting the favorite in the famous Canarsie Stakes. Once this was accomplished, the robbery was set into motion. The crime in this story is a grand coup, fantastic yet completely possible if everything clicked. So too has Lionel White achieved a grand coup in the telling of the story as he concentrates first on one character then on another, picking up the individual threads and building them into a brilliantly integrated climax. Clean Break is a masterpiece of originality, a highly plotted and ingeniously executed story of suspense.

RAFFERTYThey all trust Jack Rafferty. His wife Martha never questions him. Jill, his mistress, is completely charmed by him. Even gangster Tommy Faricetti knows that Rafferty will always do right by him. But Rafferty has dedicated himself to making organized labor his career-by whatever means necessary-and his only real loyalty is to himself. Now a Congressional Committee has got him on the witness stand, asking him questions about his past, probing the secrets that his friends and loved ones trust him with. He knows that the union is behind him. But he also knows the only person who can save Jack Rafferty is Rafferty himself.TO FIND A KILLERLt. Marty Ferris is the kind of cop who sees things in black and white. He's a good cop but has no patience for human failings. So when he begins to suspect that his wife is seeing someone on the side, he has her investigated, and finds out that she has a criminal past. Love turns to hate, and Ferris begins to plan his revenge. So when nightclub singer Billy Chamlers is found murdered, he decides to set up one of the suspects. Sam Duffy, her seedy agent, seems a good fit. But ex-con Willy Holiday is even better. It doesn't take much to badger them both into submission. In Ferris' world, they're all guilty... and one of them is going to murder his wife.

THE MONEY TRAPIt starts with a break-in. Detective Joe Baron and his partner, Pete Delanos, interview a Dr. Pantell who has just shot a man he found breaking into his office. Before he dies, the thief confesses that he was there to rob the safe, which though now empty, had earlier held at least a million dollars. So right away, Baron and Delanos know that something here is screwy. And then there''s the thief''s girlfriend who claims that Pantell set him up for the killing. Convinced that Dr. Pantell is not what he seems and that the cash in the safe is drug money, he and Delanos set about a robbery of their own. If only things had stayed that simple.... LOVE TRAPWhat would you do if you were an aspiring architect, more or less happily married, and working for two guys who had made their fortune on your designs? You resent the hell out of them, but don''t want to quit. And one day you overhear a plot to rob the business on payroll day. Would you warn your two bosses? Call the cops? Tell your wife? Harold Wilkenson doesn''t do any of these things. He doesn''t feel he owes the business a thing. But on the day of the robbery he''s dragged along by his boss to deliver the payroll cash. There is a crash, a stickup, guns fired. Harold wakes up in the hospital. Now what can he do? If he confesses that he knew about the heist, he''ll be arrested. If he rats on the thieves, they''ll kill him. Quite a trap...

AT EXACTLY 9:14 A.M.Joyce was driving along the deserted avenue.Just ahead on a side street, Cribbins checked the second hand of his watch for the last time. He swung the heavy Cadillac around the corner. He had a rendezvous with an armored car and a quarter of a million dollars; he had a tommy gun to make sure it all went off smoothly. Everything was timed, everything was planned down to the most insignificant detail-except for Joyce Sherwood and her eight-year-old Chevy, which crashed deep into the side of Cribbins' stolen car.That's how they met-the housewife and the hoods. And terror took over.

A lone driver picks up a beautiful woman and gets more than he bargained for, and the perfect heist is made complicated when a drunken neighbor climbs in the wrong window. From the author of Clean Break, filmed in 1956 by Stanley Kubrick as The Killing.