In her isolated home in the shadowy woods, Sandy Tremont prepares dinner after a fight with her daughter, Ivy. Nearby, two desperate men on the run make their way through the fading light, bloodstained and determined to leave no loose ends or witnesses. After almost 20 years as prison cellmates, they have become a deadly team: Harlan the muscle, Nick the mind and will. Opening the door to the Tremont home, Nick brings not only a legacy of terror but a secret that threatens to drag Sandy with him into the darkness.

NFL linebacker-turned-lawyer Jake Lassiter has had it with shifty clients, dirty prosecutors and a legal system out of whack. It’s enough to make a man want to leave Miami and never look back --- until he gets a call from Victoria Lord, the better half of hot local legal team Solomon & Lord. Her partner in life and law has been arrested for murder. What’s worse: the only person who can clear him has fled the city. Now it’s up to Jake and Victoria to track down the witness before she’s roped in by the feds…or eliminated by the Russian mob.

After a serious professional stumble, attorney Trevor Mann has found happiness with his girlfriend Claire Parker, a beautiful, ambitious journalist. But when Claire's newest story leads to a violent confrontation, Trevor's newly peaceful life is shattered as he tries to find out why. Chasing Claire's leads, Trevor unearths evidence of a shocking secret that --- if it actually exists --- every government and terrorist organization around the world would do anything to possess.

It’s 2004. Adán Barrera, kingpin of El Federación, is languishing in a California federal prison. Ex-DEA agent Art Keller passes his days in a monastery, having lost everything to his 30-year blood feud with the drug lord. Then Barrera escapes. Now, there’s a two-million-dollar bounty on Keller’s head and no one else capable of taking Barrera down. As the carnage of the drug war reaches surreal new heights, the two men are locked in a savage struggle that will stretch from the mountains of Sinaloa to the shores of Veracruz, to the halls of power in Washington, ensnaring countless others in its wake.

On the surface, Henry Hayden seems like someone you could like or even admire. But his past is a secret, his methods more so. No one besides him and his wife know that she is the actual writer of the novels that made him famous. For most of Henry’s life, it hasn’t been a problem. But when his hidden-in-plain-sight mistress becomes pregnant and his carefully constructed facade is about to crumble, he tries to find a permanent solution, only to make a terrible mistake.

Young Willie is on the run, having fled his small Texas farm when an infamous local landowner murdered his father. A man named Loving takes him in and trains him in the fine arts of shooting, riding, reading and gardening. When Loving dies, Willie re-christens himself Nat Love in tribute to his mentor and heads west. But the hellhounds are still on his trail, and they brutally attack Nat's love. Pursuing the men who have driven his wife mad, Nat heads south for a final showdown against those who would strip him of his life.

Hundreds of pleasure-seekers board The Beautiful Dreamer cruise ship for relaxation and fun in the Caribbean. For three sun-filled days, the journey seems to deliver all that the brochure promised. Until Day Four. Without warning, the ship stops dead. Electricity and communications are cut off. Smoke pours out of the engine room. The passengers and crew have no way to call for help and are stranded in the Gulf of Mexico. At first, all aboard are certain that rescue teams will come looking for them soon. All they have to do is wait. Supplies soon run low, the toilets stop working and a virus plagues the ship, but when the body of a woman is discovered in her cabin, irritation escalates to panic. There's a murderer on board The Beautiful Dreamer...and maybe something worse.

While on vacation in the Florida Keys, Kit Finn meets Matt Healy, a rugged stranger she literally bumps into at her hotel. He offers to cook her dinner when they’re both back in the city. But when Kit arrives at his luxury apartment ready for the date of a lifetime, she is shocked. How could she have been taken in by the deceptions of a con man? And why has he targeted her? Now the only way out is to expose the vicious puppet master who’s turned her life upside down.

The stories in CHARLIE MARTZ AND OTHER STORIES, produced early in Elmore Leonard’s career, reveal a writer in transition. Here, he explores new voices and locations --- from the bars of small-town New Mexico and Michigan to a film set in Hollywood, a hotel in Southern Spain, even a military base in Kuala Lumpur. They also introduce us to classic Leonard characters, some of whom recur throughout the collection, such as aging lawman Charlie Martz and weary former matador Eladio Montoya.

When former investigative reporter Rick Hoffman loses his job, fiancée and apartment, his only option is to move back into --- and renovate --- the home of his miserable youth, now empty and in decay since the stroke that put his father in a nursing home. As Rick starts to pull apart the old house, he makes an electrifying discovery: millions of dollars hidden in the walls. Yet the more of his father’s hidden past that Rick brings to light, the more dangerous his present becomes.