Crime Must Pay the Penalty #44

A brilliant young medical student with a gift for surgery makes one desperate mistake—stealing drugs to impress a girl—and watches his entire future collapse in a single violent moment. Cast out from legitimate medicine and hardened by years in prison, Lex Jordon discovers he can still practice his craft in the criminal underworld, using his surgical skills to alter the faces and fingerprints of wanted fugitives. But freedom on the run proves a different kind of cage, as pressure from both the law and his gangland employers steadily erodes the steady hands and sharper mind that once defined him.

Milton Vaughan calls himself an artist, but his medium is the tommy gun—a skill that catches the eye of gangster Mickey Ganz in 1930. When Ganz hires him to protect bootleg shipments from hijackers, Vaughan proves his deadly talent, but a tragic mistake during a federal raid on a train sets him on the run. Now hunted by both the mob and the F.B.I., Vaughan flees from city to city, hoping to stay alive and ahead of those he's wronged.

In 1950s Brooklyn, childhood friends Calvin Pratt and Mickey Brogan turn their warped ambitions into a life of racketeering and violence along the docks, drawing in Mickey's sister Lois despite her pleas for them to go straight. When Calvin's ruthlessness catches up with him, Lois finds herself caught between her brother's dangerous path and the men who claim they can protect her—but in this world, survival and loyalty come at a terrible price.

When a small-time hustler named Sanford Onslow joins the ruthless criminal enterprise of the mysterious Il Diavolo in 1930s Chicago, he becomes the wheelman for a string of brutal holdups—until a careless mistake at a grocery store job puts him directly in Inspector Norman's sights. As the law closes in and Il Diavolo's grip tightens, Onslow finds himself trapped between a detective determined to crack the case and a criminal mastermind who brooks no loose ends. Inspector Norman must piece together the identity of the enigmatic crime boss before Il Diavolo silences everyone who knows his true name.