Crime Must Pay the Penalty #24

When a young criminal known as Mike Madison discovers that alibis can buy freedom from murder, he builds a criminal empire on false testimony and clever deceptions—until the law student he once brutalized, John Clemson, rises to become district attorney with a personal vendetta to clean up the city. As Madison's carefully constructed lies begin to crumble under Clemson's relentless pursuit, the man who built his fortune on fraud faces a reckoning he never thought possible.

When the mysterious crime lord known as B. P. Prescott—the "Big Mouth"—rules the underworld through an iron grip of corruption and violence, a newly appointed police commissioner named Bill Trencher vows to expose him and clean up a city drowning in graft. As Trencher's reforms shake the criminal underworld and rival gangs begin circling, the Big Mouth must navigate a dangerous war that threatens to unravel everything he's built. With informants hunted down and the stakes rising higher each day, the invisible master of the underworld faces his greatest challenge yet.

Terry Foley, a ruthless pool-room tough with a lucky silver dollar he believes makes him unstoppable, rises from street grifter to crime boss by muscling in on the city's milk delivery business, squeezing protection money from every dairy in town. When a principled young District Attorney named George Hammer organizes the dairymen to fight back and builds a case against Foley's empire, the desperate gangster goes on the run—but his faith in his lucky coin won't let him accept defeat. As Foley's criminal world collapses around him, he makes a final, dangerous gamble that will test whether his talisman can truly protect him from the law's reckoning.

King Crown, the stubborn owner of the Crown Klub nightclub, refuses to pay protection money to Rick Pinto's racket—a decision that puts a target on his back when two of Pinto's men end up dead in his office. As Pinto escalates his vendetta with ambushes, bullets, and bombs, Crown relies on his own wits and gun to survive each attempt on his life, while D.A. Tom Manders grows increasingly desperate to convince him that only cooperation with the law can end the cycle of violence.