SO A WAR VET, A PSYCHOPATH, AND A HOT BABE WALK INTO WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK...

...and years later they tell us what Greenwich Village was like in the 1950s. Lawrence Block was on the scene, just starting to find himself as a writer, and A Diet of Treacle was his attempt to get it all down on paper.

It was published by a low-rent paperback house, with a tacky title and a pen name, and disappeared from view until Hard Case Crime found

...

Sometimes growing up means facing your demons. The son of a struggling single mother, Jamie Conklin just wants an ordinary childhood. But Jamie is no ordinary child. Born with an unnatural ability his mom urges him to keep secret, Jamie can see what no one else can see and learn what no one else can learn. But the cost of using this ability is higher than Jamie can imagine - as he discovers when an NYPD detective draws him into the pursuit of a killer...

"Even the enigmatic hit man called Quarry had to start somewhere. And for him that was the day he returned stateside from Nam to find his young wife cheating. He'd killed plenty overseas, so killing her lover was no big deal. And when he was recruited to use his skills as a contract killer, that transition was easy, too. He survived in this jungle as he had in that other one--by expecting trouble. What he didn't expect was ever running into her again..."--from...

"Quarry doesn't kill just anybody these days. He restricts himself to targeting other hitmen, availing his marked-for-death clients of two services: eliminating the killers sent after them, and finding out who hired them--and then removing that problem as well. So far he's rid the world of nobody who would be missed. But this time he finds himself zeroing in on the grieving family of a missing cheerleader. Does the hitman's hitman have the wrong...

"The assignment was simple: stake out the man's house and kill him. Easy work for a professional like Quarry. But when things go horribly wrong, Quarry finds himself with a new mission: learn who hired him, and make the bastard pay"--Page [4] of cover.

NYPD detective Jack Stang receives word that his old fiancee, Bettie, who supposedly died in a kidnapping-gone-wrong 20 years earlier, is still alive and residing in a small Florida coastal community. The good news is countered by the fact that, in the car crash that was supposed to have killed her, she lost her eyesight and all her memories. Even worse, the men who had her kidnapped in the first place have perfectly good memories and are still looking...

Fugitive Angel Petrakos hooks up with a serial killer in Ireland, while her ex-lover and partner, Max Fisher, a failed New York businessman, reinvents himself as a crack dealer.

At the end of Yellow Street, in a ruined junkyard of a house, an angry outcast hatches a scheme to take revenge for all the wrongs he has suffered. With the help of three alienated neighborhood kids, he plans to hide razor blades, poison, drugs, and broken glass in Halloween candy and use the deadly treats to maim or kill dozens of innocent children. But as the clock ticks closer to sundown, will one of his helpers-an innocent himself, in his own...

The lawyer, the jeweler, the art critic, and the oil-company man...self-possessed, independent Lora Winter has had a child with each of them. But when one of these men drives up to her house with a fifth man in the car, Lora runs to hide. That's how this extraordinary novel opens - and by the time it ends, you'll have pieced together a masterful psychological jigsaw puzzle that is miles from a traditional crime novel, but whose desperate characters...