Gangsters Can't Win #8

When a washed-up big-game hunter named Dick Taylor accepts a job from a botanist seeking a rare giant lotus in Nepal, he gets far more than he bargained for—a treacherous journey through malaria swamps and mountain peaks that leads to an encounter with the fierce warrior princess Rhanee and her people. Captured and brought before the mysterious High Lama in a hidden temple at the roof of the world, Taylor and Dr. Fields find themselves trapped in a land where outsiders are forbidden and escape seems impossible. What begins as a botanical expedition becomes a tale of survival against overwhelming odds in one of Earth's most remote and dangerous corners.

When a mill worker falls into a vat of molten cyanide, union delegate Jim Banks and his friend George Miller rush to prevent tragedy—but the accident that follows sets off a chain of jealousy, suspicion, and buried secrets. As George struggles with his feelings for Helen, the woman he's lost to Jim, a mysterious poisoning forces the mill's investigators to separate guilt from circumstance in a case where nearly anyone could be the killer. Spivy Spinell's crooked betting operation and the mill's dangerous machinery become the perfect cover for a crime that demands cunning detective work to uncover.

When Perry Sloan stumbles onto a case of arson that leads him to an abandoned schooner, he finds himself caught between a corpse and a desperate man with a gun—all while being mistaken for someone named Alex. Desperate for cash and a fresh start, Sloan agrees to an unusual proposition: impersonate Alexander Hancock, the wealthy president of Hancock Marine Insurance, while Hancock takes a sudden vacation. But as Sloan settles into his borrowed life, the pieces of a larger scheme begin to feel dangerously out of place.

In this tale from 1949, ruthless businessman Rodney Graham built his empire by swindling inventor Ezra Goodchild out of his patent rights and framing his own partner Taylor Prentice to eliminate competition—but two decades of unchecked cruelty finally catch up with him when he plummets to his death in a sabotaged elevator. As detectives work to solve the murder, they'll uncover just how many lives Graham destroyed in his climb to power, and which of his victims finally decided to take justice into their own hands.

Fred H. Reeder, a volatile plant manager known for his explosive temper, storms through town on a sweltering July day—and when a body turns up with a gunshot wound to the chest, suspicion falls squarely on him. A newly promoted detective must untangle whether Reeder's hair-trigger anger makes him guilty or whether something else entirely is at play in this crime-o-graph case from Gangsters Can't Win.

Al Sawin is just a carefree hitchhiker drifting across Texas, snapping photographs and enjoying the open road—until a smooth-talking stranger offers him a ride and a generous new suit. What Sawin doesn't realize is that he's stumbled into the crosshairs of Doug, Jane, and a scheme involving stolen bank money and a fake death that needs a body to pull it off. With criminals closing in and danger lurking at every turn, this young drifter's simple love of landscape photography becomes a fight for survival on a deadly highway.