An unscrupulous businessman targets a family chemical company Though his business cards read "Mason Villiers," that is not his name. His respectable lower-middle-class upbringing—with its innocent stories of hot rods and prom queens—is a lie. Though an expert on finance, he has no formal education. The man who calls himself Mason Villiers was raised on the streets of Chicago's rough South Side, and once he clawed himself out of the gutter he decided no one should know where he came from. His past doesn't matter. Villiers is headed for the top, no matter how many throats he must cut along the way. Having made a name for himself in swashbuckling business dealings, Villiers plans a hostile takeover of a family-owned chemical company. Although Melbard Chemical's stock hovers at rock bottom, Villiers makes an astronomical offer. Melbard Chemical has a valuable secret, and there is no one more ready to exploit it than Villiers.

A United States Air Force bomber threatens to obliterate New York The whole city sees the plane circling: an ancient B-17 bomber flying inches above the tops of Manhattan's skyscrapers. As it nears Midtown, its bomb-bay doors creak open, giving the citizens a terrifying view of its five-hundred-pound bombs. No one knows why it's there. As city officials attempt to identify it, the B-17's pilot issues his demands. He wants five million dollars in unmarked bills, or Manhattan will burn.   Reasoning with the strangely calm pilot is impossible. To attack the plane is madness, for the pilot would have time to release his payload before going down. They have to get him out of the sky—but how?   Told in retrospect, through the documents and interviews of an official commission of inquiry, Target Manhattan is a chilling story of what can happen when America's military might turns against itself.

A lawyer tracks a gang of amateur kidnappers across the southwestern desert By the time Carl Oakley gets to Soledad, the town is an empty shell. But the lawyer isn't looking for the city; he wants to find Terry Conniston. A tire track proves that her sports car passed through not long ago, but Carl doubts Terry was driving. Likely it was Floyd Rymer behind the wheel. With his brother and two other drug-addled thugs, Floyd fronts a second-rate jazz combo whose chief accomplishment, up until now, was a string of steady gigs in fleabag venues up and down the West Coast. Eighteen hours ago, he and his band graduated to kidnapping.   In exchange for Terry, the musicians demand a half million dollars. Some would pay the money; some would call the FBI. Carl Oakley goes hunting. If Terry Conniston is going to die, Carl wants to pull the trigger.

A Navajo trooper tracks a murderous fugitive loose on the reservation Joe Threepersons is a killer, but that doesn't bother most of the people on the Apache reservation. After all, killing a white man is not an unforgiveable crime. Sam Watchman, on the other hand, is paid to care. Though a proud Navajo, he's also a state trooper, so tracking killers is his business. The sheriff sent him because of his familiarity with the reservation, but no man knows this territory like Threepersons. The killer has a rifle, a stolen horse, and thousands of friends willing to give him sanctuary.   As Watchman gives chase, Threepersons eludes him at every turn. But the trooper will get his man. After all, the murderer has only two million acres in which to hide.

A dozen stories tracking the CIA's most adept—and unusual—spy There are no more spies like Charlie Dark. An old-timer whose experience stretches back to the Second World War, his main distinction is that after decades playing the game he is still alive. He is overweight, clumsy, and afraid of guns—a nonconformist in an agency built on toeing the line. Though his superiors hate him for his eccentricities, they privately admit that he may be the best spy they have.   Charlie travels the globe in these twelve stories, working in Berlin, Moscow, Africa, and Asia. He fights a female assassin in Dar es Salaam, and looks for a computer chip lost in the permanent snows of the Aleutian Islands. He adapts continuously, for each adventure is a new puzzle, and a new opportunity to die.

During World War II, a Russian refugee spies for the United States Since the great upheaval of November 1917, Alex Denilov has known nothing but war. In the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, he fought for the old imperial order. When the Reds won out, he fled west, finding work in every war that followed. Now, in 1941, he trains paratroopers in the American Southwest, helping the US Army prepare for the coming war. But Uncle Sam has bigger plans for him. The army transfers Alex to special services, where he is reunited with old colleagues from the civil war. The group shares combat skills, knowledge of the Russian language, and an intense hatred of Communists. Their mission is to assassinate Stalin. But inside this group of killers, a traitor lurks, ready to kill Alex before he attempts to save Russia from itself.

Bored with retirement, an ex-spy challenges his old agency to a game Miles Kendig is one of the CIA's top deep-cover agents, until an injury ruins him for active duty. Rather than take a desk job, he retires. But the tawdry thrills of civilian life—gambling, drinking, sex—offer none of the pleasures of the intelligence game. Even a Russian agent's offer to go to work against his old employers seems dull. Without the thrill of unpredictable conflict, Kendig skulks through Paris like the walking dead. To revive himself, he begins writing a tell-all memoir, divulging every secret he accumulated in his long career. Neither CIA nor KGB can afford to have it in print, and so he challenges them both: Until they catch him, a chapter will go to the publisher every week. Kendig's life is fun again, with survival on the line.

When her son is kidnapped in Mexico, a mother seeks vengeance Film director Carole Marchand's son has just been kidnapped for the third time. The first two times weren't as troubling, since Carole had abducted Robert herself—incidents in her hideous divorce. This time, the kidnappers are unknown killers, and Carole wants to know what her ex-husband Warren is going to do about it.   Robert was in Mexico with the American ambassador when gunmen swarmed their convoy, taking the ambassador and snatching Robert up with him. As Robert disappears into Central America, Warren and his colleagues at the State Department turn up no leads. Because Robert wasn't their actual target, his life has little value. When Carole receives word that Robert has been killed, she resolves to take revenge. If the government won't help her, she will punish her child's killers herself.

To escape her husband, a wife embarks on a radical adventure Her name is Jennifer Hartman, or perhaps Dorothy Holder. She has birth certificates that say both. She got the names from old obituary files, and then went to the county clerk to ask for new copies. Her real name doesn't matter, because her former life is gone. Since she went on the run, she has surprised herself with her ingenuity. She makes her way to Los Angeles and takes a room in an unassuming, out-of-the-way motel. She destroys her credit cards but keeps her old driver's license—she has one last use for it. She enrolls in flying lessons, taking three or four a week in order to master the small plane as quickly as possible. Her plan is complex but, if it works, brilliant.   She is fleeing her husband. A single error will mean death, but she is through with mistakes.

A mental patient escapes his institution in search of bloody vengeance When rain falls on the mental hospital, Calvin Duggai knows it's time to leave. Institutionalized after he abandoned five men to die in the Mojave Desert, he has spent years planning escape and revenge. For months he has tunneled through the asylum's bathroom wall, waiting for a night when rain will cover his tracks. As water soaks the grounds of the silent institution, Duggai punches a hole in the stucco wall and creeps out onto the building's ledge. After a mistimed leap, he limps to the chain link fence with a cracked knee.   As he scales the twelve-foot barbed-wire fence, he ignores the searing pain. The men who sent him away must be punished. Duggai has four doctors to kill.

About the AuthorBestseller Brian Garfield lives in California. He has written more than fifty novels, and eighteen films are based on his works. He has served in the U.S. Army and has been president of both the Western Writers of America and the Mystery Writers of America (and received the latter's Edgar Award for best novel of the year). A film about young Theodore Roosevelt in the Wild West, based on Garfield's book Manifest Destiny, is in pre-production. His 2007 The Meinertzhagen Mystery is a biography of a British rogue spy who was a model for Ian Fleming's James Bond. Garfield's works include The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians, the original films Legs and The Stepfather, and such novels-later-filmed as Death Wish, Wild Times, Relentless, The Last Hard Men, Fleshburn, Necessity, and the award-nominated Hopscotch, with Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson, which Garfield co-produced and co-wrote from his own novel.