Westlake Donald E. Скачать все книги 17 Количество книг

You are in the jungles of Belize.

You pick your way carefully along the overgrown trail until you come to the clearing. There, above you, rest the ruins of a Mayan pyramid. Is that a stone whistle at your feet? An idol of a bat-god? Riches surround you and Kirby Galway will be more than happy to smuggle your finds up to the United States in a bale of marijuana. Aren’t you glad you met Kirby?

If you are Innocent St. Michael, wily Belizan bureaucrat, you’re not. After all, you sold Kirby the worthless land and know that there are no treasures — not to mention pyramids — on it. If you are Lemuel the curator, you’re not. After all, these artifacts should be protected — by you and in your own way. If you are St. Michael’s assistant Vernon, you’re not. After all, you involved in a plot to overthrow the government and all the visitors Kirby is bringing in are making your job more difficult.

Perhaps you are one of the two homosexual antique dealers with a secret to keep hidden, or maybe you are Valerie — loved, kidnaped, ordered to be executed and otherwise getting in the way. If you are, meeting Kirby didn’t do anything for your disposition, either.

Now it is turn to meet Kirby Galway and begin the most hilarious adventure of your life.

Engel had worked his way up to being Nick Rovito’s right-hand man, near the top of the Syndicate. And this was a delicate job — retrieving a very important jacket, loaded with heroin, from a fresh grave. But Engel found only an empty coffin...

Tom Garrity and Joe Loomis are cops in New York — commuters to a job in a city where people often feel like animals. As cops, they’re at the center of it. The brutalizers and the brutalized. Unable to take much more of it, they invent a romantic dream for getting the hell out. The cops decide to become robbers.

Joe discovers that a blue uniform will get you in anywhere; allow you, for instance, to hold up a liquor store without even being suspected. He and Tom decide to pull one big caper that will net them each a million. Then they’ll wait around a year, and after that pull out for good. They offer their services to the Mafia, because on their own they don’t know what crime to commit for that kind of money. A Mafia boss named Vigano points them in the right direction. After that there is no turning back, and no guarantee that they’ll make it.

What happens to Tom and Joe and their families as they make their breakaway move is what COPS AND ROBBERS is all about. Here is a major novel on a major theme by Donald E. Westlake who, in telling a brand new kind of story, makes use of his proven ability to create suspense and entertainment.

Jack Pine was born to be a Hollywood star. He has no morals, no scruples; he will not hesitate to do anything or love anyone if it might advance his career, get him the best roles, or project him ever more firmly into the spotlight.

And success does come, beyond the imagination of Jack’s agents and co-stars — even beyond the hopes of his boyhood friend Buddy Pal, a man who carries with the dark secrets of Jack’s past.

Buddy stands apart, aloof: he alone truly benefits from Jack’s careening ambition and his artful, charming conniving. Others who depend on Jack may fall by the wayside, but how can the affable star be blamed?

In fact, Jack Pine can be excused anything — until he carries out the final sin, for which there can be no pardon.

Misadventures of a young cab driver who, when trying to collect some race track winnings, becomes embroiled in the mystery surrounding the murder of his bookie.

The madman clung to the side of the hill, hidden by darkness and trees. Staring over his left shoulder he could see the lights in pairs crossing the bottom of the night, round whites when coming aslant, red dots when going. Only the circling red light atop the state police car did not move on, across the valley floor and out of sight. The ambulance had gone now, and the traffic jam had been broken up, but the state police car did not move on.

Down below him, past the trees, he could see the headlights going by. He was waiting for the state police car with the circling red light to go on, to go away with the rest of the lights, and then he could move. But the state police car didn’t go away.

And now more red lights came, borne on the stream of headlights. The madman reared up, almost losing his balance and rolling down the hill, and stared in hatred at the revolving red lights. Three more of them, all stopping by the first. Dimly amid the lights he could see men moving, and then a different kind of light appeared. A small nailhole of light in the darkness. Flashlights. Men with flashlights crossed the road down there and started up the hill, spreading out, opening like a fan. He lost sight of them all in the trees, and saw a flicker of light, and And

They were coming after him.

The madman put his head down on the ground, his burning forehead against the cool dampness of the turf. Despair washed over him. Just after dinner he’d broken out, and before midnight he was to be caught again. They would make him scream for this, the shock every day, death and rebirth every day, going down and away to spasmodic shrieks and coming back to twitches and deafness and the cold blue eyes of Doctor Chax. (There was no Doctor Chax; all the doctors were Doctor Chax: all the doctors had the cold blue eyes and the warm brown voices, and told him while they tortured him that the torture was for his own good; he had made up the name, Doctor Chax. It was all of them.)

He would go back to Doctor Chax. He would

He got away. He had the surface plausibility of the completely mad and a glittering intelligence. Also, he had no compunction about destroying anybody who stood in his way.

PITY HIM AFTERWARDS is a terrifying tour de force of suspense.

Nabbed midheist, Dortmunder has to do some fast thinking.

Ed Topliss has a problem.

Two and a half years ago, he was approached by a publishing executive of dubious credentials, who said, “If you can write a grammatical letter, you can write a sex novel.” Since then, Topliss (who also writes under the pseudonyms of Dirk Smuff and Dwayne Toppil) has written one sex novel each month for $1,000 per book. According to his formula, that’s 10 chapters of 5,000 words each with one sex scene in each chapter — or 280 various sexual acts in his entire career.

But Ed Topliss has reached an impasse. Twenty-five years old, the only son of a cocktail waitress, a graduate of Monequois College, the father of a young girl named Elfreda who was conceived before matrimony, Topliss is haunted by an unflagging desire to be a writer. Beset by personal and financial crises, he suddenly discovers he cannot write on schedule. His wife leaves home, his fantasy life starts to merge with his real life, and indeed it seems as if his whole future hangs in jeopardy.

In Donald E. Westlake, best known for his novels of comic suspense turns his attention to a new area. With the same delightful style that won him the Mystery Writers Award for the best novel of 1967, Westlake creates a touching, funny, thoroughly enjoyable portrait of what happens when a small-time writer tries to “make it” in the world of big-time pornography.

Who stole Sassi Manoon?

Ask Kelly Bram Nicholas IV, the world’s youngest mad scientist, who gets all answers from Starnap, the seagoing computer.

Or ask Jigger Jackson, the girl who wants to be a movie star so bad she’d sell somebody body for the chance.

Or ask Frank Ashford, the boy of 1,000 voices 1,000, none of them his own.

Or ask Robby Creswel, the black man’s answer to Raffles, perpetrator of the first crime-in.

Or ask Major Alfred ffork-Linton and Miss Adelaide Rushby, the slightly dotty and vaguely mysterious couple who could even be exactly what they seem.

Or ask Benny Bernard, the forlorn flack whose principal companions are a pair of Afghan hounds named Kama and Sutra.

Or ask Sassi Manoon herself, the movie queen, the superstar, the million-dollar property swiped from the middle of a swinging film festival on a Caribbean island and held by everybody in sight. Ask Sassi Manoon who stole Sassi Manoon... and then ask her why she didn’t mind.

Or you could ask Donald E. Westlake, whose hilarious explanations of the light side of the underworld have included last year’s award-winning and who here turns crossed eyes on the World of Film, the ancient and dishonorable art of Holding for Ransom, and the winning delusion that Love Will Find a Way. It’s all on the inside, a carnival caper of the Spanish Main, the loony Westlake touch that promises the daffiest band of desperadoes synchronizing their watches since Alec Guinness went straight.

Who stole Sassi Manoon? You’ll have a great time finding out.

On a literary landscape filled with cunning criminal masterminds, Donald E. Westlake’s John Dortmunder is in a league of his own. With no scam too outrageous to contemplate, and no plan too simple to go wrong, this quirky career thief has stolen everything from money buried under a reservoir to a bank — the bank. Now the ultimate repeat offender returns in a first-time collection of short stories that prove that just like bagels and donuts, with Dortmunder it’s always better by the dozen... THIEVES’ DOZEN

The master of the comic caper is back with a new riotous tale of double identity. When Art Dodge falls in love with beautiful twins, he wants both all to himself. So, Art and Bart Dodge marry the girls, until he is exhausted and decides Bart has to go.

John Dortmunder y su banda son contratados por un embajador africano para robar un famoso diamante, conocido como Balabomo, que cobija celosamente otro país africano. Dortmunder es extremadamente hábil y minucioso, pero lamentablemente desafortunado. Siempre fracasa. Con la suerte de espaldas, se ve condenado a planificar el golpe una y otra vez con una inercia y tenacidad casi religiosas. «La vida es un equívoco constante» parece decir el escurridizo diamante a la banda de Dortmunder. Ellos, impasibles, le intentarán dar caza por tierra, mar y aire. Un diamante al rojo vivo es una de las obras maestras del extraordinario Donald Westlake. Sin lugar a dudas, su novela más hilarante e ingeniosa. Una brillante comedia repleta de equívocos y llena de personajes inolvidables, con la que John Dortmunder, ladrón y gafe profesional, se presenta en sociedad. Todo un mito de la novela negra.

For 25 years, Burke Devore has provided for his family and played by the rules. Until now. Downsized from his job, Devore is slipping away: from his wife, his family, and from all civilized norms of behavior. He wants his life back, and will do anything to get it. In this relentlessly fascinating novel, the masterful Westlake takes readers on a journey of obsession and outrage inside a quiet man’s desperate world.

Parker, el personaje más emblemático creado por Donald E. Westlake (Brooklyn, Nueva York, 1933), es un ladrón profesional y, eventualmente, un asesino. Un hombre frío y calculador, reservado hasta la exasperación y dueño de una inteligencia más que destacable. Dos años atrás, Parker se vio obligado a abandonar en la pequeña y apacible ciudad de Tyler, en el estado de Mississippi, los setenta y tres mil dólares de botín de un robo a un coche blindado. Ahora ha llegado el momento de recuperar lo que es suyo, y para ello se va a ver involucrado en una guerra entre las mafias que controlan la ciudad. Parker, acompañado por Grofield, su cómplice, tendrá que demostrar su profesionalidad y agudizar el ingenio para lograr su objetivo, tarea nada fácil dado el poder de sus adversarios…

Escrita en 1974, La luna de los asesinos es, sin lugar a dudas, una de las mejores novelas de este gran escritor norteamericano que revolucionó el género policíaco al ofrecer una nueva concepción que se aleja de los lugares comunes y los viejos clichés que siempre lo habían acompañado. El estilo ágil y directo, sin florituras ni descripciones innecesarias, acompañado de un elegante sentido del humor, acentúa la tensión de la novela, que no deja de crecer desde la primera página, hasta resolverse en un final brutal e inolvidable que revela la precisión narrativa de uno de los principales escritores norteamericanos de novela policíaca del siglo XX.

In Uganda in 1977, a particular trainload of coffee, mostly belonging to dictator Idi Amin, is worth six million dollars. As a group of scoundrels and international financiers hijack the train, the double and triple crosses pile up and the comic tension escalates in a brawling brew of buffoons, bumblers, beans and boxcars.

This 1981 Westlake gem is back in print. A mile-long freight train steams through the heart of Idi Amin’s mad, tortured, magical, and corrupt Uganda, loaded down with kahawa (Swahili for coffee). What Amin doesn't know, what his most beautiful spy has not been able to wring out of her latest victim, and what the world’s coffee markets may be unable to swallow, is that the train and six million dollars worth of coffee are about to disappear into the hands of a conflicted, colorful, swashbuckling band of mercenaries and moneymakers.

Winston was a town where, as in a mobile, everything balanced precariously. It looked all right to visitors, and even to most of the people who lived there. Children got to school safely, and there wasn’t much union trouble, and the streets were fairly clean and well paved. A few people knew better about Winston — because they ran the town.

KILLING TIME is the story of what happened when a couple of outsiders tried to interfere with those few people. The VIPs you’ll meet in the book are briefly described herewith.

TIM SMITH — the only private eye in town — who maintained this status with a “little black book”

JORDAN REED — the business big-wig who was mayor of Winston in everything but name

DAN WANAMAKER — who had the name of Mayor

HARCUM — the boy who was voted least likely to succeed — so of course became Police Chief

JACK WYCZA — the councilman who believed in nepotism — when he needed it

RON LASCOW — the town’s sharpest young lawyer or youngest sharp lawyer

SHERRI — a girl who played both sides of the game once too often

PAUL MASETTI — who came to town with the peculiar project of buying a man

JOEY CASALE — the grocer with a family he could turn into an army — and did

Of Donald Westlake’s first novel, one reviewer wrote: “Mr. Westlake’s clipped, breezy, bitter picture of a college man who found crime paid and was stimulating, too, marks him as a newcomer most certainly arrived.”

“Clipped, breezy, bitter” could certainly be used about killing time. To this add: rough, tough, and fast as a bullet.

John Dortmunder left prison with the warm words of the warden ringing in his ears and not one chance of going straight. Soon Dortmunder was riding in a stolen Cadillac with venetian blinds, reuniting with old friends and scheming to heist a large emerald belonging to a small African nation. As always, his planning is meticulous. As always, the execution is not. Undaunted, Dortmunder is now chasing the gem by plane, train and automobile. Because this hot rock has a way of getting stolen — not just once, but again and again and again…