Police Against Crime #1

Officer Tom Dennis thought he had a troubled kid on his beat—Tony Brent, a young man with money but no job and a chip on his shoulder—until his memory connected the angry teenager to Martin Brevassi, a prisoner Dennis helped convict years before. Now Dennis must uncover what really happened five years back and keep Tony from destroying himself in a quest for revenge against the man who may have framed his father, all while a dangerous criminal from that past resurfaces on the same streets.

When a pretty young woman named Mary Thompson brings word of her boyfriend Jerry Miller's involvement in a television set scam to Captain Drake of the Bunko Squad, the officer listens carefully as she recounts how Jerry, an honest garage worker, got drawn into selling what he thought were legitimate trade-in sets to his friends—only to discover the sets were fakes, leaving him looking like a willing accomplice. Drake's hunch about the real con-man behind the scheme sets him on a different investigation, one that might be the key to clearing Jerry's name and catching the actual fraudsters.

A twisted mind born in the gutter, Edward Collins claws his way up through the underworld as the ruthless, unpredictable "Madman"—a criminal so vicious and uncontrollable that he turns on allies and enemies alike in his climb toward infamy. When the Syndicate refuses to bend to his demands, Madman wages a brutal one-man war that eventually draws the full force of law enforcement to his doorstep. This pulse-pounding crime tale from 1954 tracks a dangerous hood's reign of terror and the cops determined to bring him down.

Lieutenant Paddy Shea of the Homicide Bureau is convinced that a hunting accident in Hessian County is anything but—a sharpshooter's widow and her brother-in-law are too eager to dismiss it as carelessness, and Shea's instincts won't let him walk away. When he uncovers travel plans for a suspicious escape, he hatches a trap that could expose a calculated murder scheme. It's a race against the clock to prove what everyone else refuses to see.