Crime Must Pay the Penalty #25

"Birdie" Coogan is one of the most dangerous criminals of the decade—a ruthless young thug with a gift for planning and a trigger finger to match. After orchestrating a series of bold crimes across Philadelphia and New York, from a casino heist to a daring piracy at sea, Coogan's luck begins to show its cracks. When his carefully calculated crimes finally catch up with him, that one small mistake proves to be the undoing of a brutal career.

When a young man is arrested for robbery on the word of a single witness, he claims he's been framed—and his fiancée, determined to prove his innocence, takes a job at the company where the real crime may have occurred. As she keeps watch on her suspect, she uncovers a pattern that could clear her imprisoned lover's name in this tense 1952 crime story.

Rod Koster's ruthless mob pulls off a jewel heist that leaves bodies in its wake, but when their fence backs out, they turn to a desperate private detective named Phil Dorgan with a proposition: recover their stolen goods and collect a fat paycheck, no questions asked about where they came from. As Dorgan climbs higher in the criminal underworld's esteem, he finds himself caught between the law closing in and the killer he's secretly helping—unaware that someone very close to him may have her own agenda.

A postal clerk with grandiose ambitions, Sam Corbalis turns to theft when temptation proves too strong, stealing from the mail and dragging his fiancée into a criminal spiral that grows more desperate and dangerous by the day. When her brother Jack becomes a postal inspector, the walls close in on Corbalis—and his final, violent choices leave no one unharmed. This 1952 crime story shows how one man's refusal to play by the rules shatters everyone around him.