George V. Higgins

The classic novel from "America's best crime novelist" (Time), with a new introduction by Dennis LehaneGeorge V. Higgins's seminal crime novel is a down-and-dirty tale of thieves, mobsters, and cops on the mean streets of Boston. When small-time gunrunner Eddie Coyle is convicted on a felony, he's looking at three years in the pen--that is, unless he sells out one of his big-fish clients to the DA. But which of the many hoods, gunmen, and executioners whom he calls his friends should he send up the river? Told almost entirely in crackling dialogue by a vivid cast of lowlifes and detectives, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is one of the greatest crime novels ever written.“The best crime novel ever written--makes The Maltese Falcon read like Nancy Drew.” -- Elmore Leonard

Cogan's Trade is the top-notch crime novel rated by the New Yorker as the “best” from “the Balzac of the Boston underworld.” Crackling dialogue, mordant humor, and unremitting tension drive the suspenseful stakes of the game higher in Boston’s precarious underworld of small-time mobsters, crooked lawyers, and political gofers as George V. Higgins, the writer who boiled crime fiction harder, tracks Jackie Cogan’s career in a gangland version of law and order. For Cogan is an enforcer; and when the Mob’s rules get broken, he gets hired to ply his trade—murder. In the gritty, tough-talking pages of Higgins’s 1974 national best-seller, Cogan is called in when a high-stake card game under the protection of the Mob is heisted. Expertly, with a ruthless businessman’s efficiency, a shrewd sense of other people’s weaknesses, and a style as cold as his stare, Cogan moves with reliable precision to restore the status quo as ill-conceived capers and double-dealing shenanigans erupt into high-voltage violence. “Higgins writes about the world of crime with an authenticity that is unmatched.”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

Jerry "Digger" Doherty is an ex-con and proprietor of a workingman's Boston bar, who supplements his income with the occasional "odd job," like stealing live checks and picking up hot goods. His brother’s a priest, his wife’s a nag, and he’s got a deadly appetite for martinis and gambling. But when the Digger looses eighteen grand in borrowed money on a trip to Vegas, he quickly finds himself in the sights of mob loneshark “the Greek,” who will have to make the Digger pay up one way or another. Luckily—if you call it luck—the Digger has been let in on a little job that can turn his gambling debt into a profit, as long as he can pull it off without getting killed.

The Rat on Fire is a riveting, blistering hot novel about the shady side of the law and the business side of the Boston underworld by the one and only George V. Higgins. Jerry Fein is a small-time lawyer, occasional booking agent, and full-time slumlord. But he's nobody's fool. So when the tenants of his dilapidated buildings refuse to pay rent because of rats, Jerry knows just the man to help Leo Proctor, a professional arsonist, who can make a fire marshal look the other way for a little cash. But the heat is on over at the police station as well. A couple of cops are suddenly feeling pressure from their superiors to produce, and something has got to give. Full of hardnosed cops and lawyers a little too familiar with both sides of the law, The Rat on Fire is another Higgins masterpiece and an unflinching portrait of the Boston crime world.

An honest man with few illusions that have gone unchallenged, criminal lawyer Jerry Kennedy is hard put to reconcile his professional life--defending car thieves, pimps, pushers, and mobsters--with his family life

George Higgins's Swan Song/bpiAt End of Day/i, George V. Higgins's final novel, was completed in the fall of 1999, just weeks before the author's death at the age of 59. It seems unlikely that the coming year will bring us a novel with a sadder, more appropriate title. Like Higgins's famous first novel, iThe Friends of Eddie Coyle/i, iAt End of Day/i is an authoritative and decidedly unromantic portrait of life as it is really lived in the criminal underworld of Boston. Like iEddie Coyle/i, it is the clear product of a genuine American master.pTwo figures dominate the crowded narrative: Arthur McKeach and Nick Cistaro, career criminals who have clawed their way to the top of the food chain by ruthlessly eliminating all competitors and who have remained at the top -- unchallenged and unindicted -- for an unnaturally long time. Together, McKeach and Cistaro have successfully opposed the traditional center of organized crime -- the Cosa Nostra -- and have established an empire based on extortion, gambling, drug dealing, loan sharking, and the rigorous application of terrorist tactics. They rule by fear and will do whatever is necessary to preserve what they have built.piAt End of Day/i is the story of the violent world of McKeach and Cistaro, and of the secret "arrangement" that has kept them in power -- and out of jail -- for decades. More than 30 years before the primary narrative begins, McKeach and his partner established a symbiotic relationship with the FBI's resident expert on organized crime. In exchange for information to be used against their common enemy -- the Boston Mafia -- the two received a degree of protection from the inconvenient investigations of local law enforcement agencies. This immensely profitable arrangement, which was passed along like a family legacy from one FBI agent to the next, has persisted into the present day and has contributed enormously to the durability of the McKeach/Cistaro empire.pThis devious, mutually corrupting relationship stands at the heart of this painstaking portrait of the Boston criminal milieu. As always, Higgins fleshes out the portrait with a varied, credible gallery of characters on both sides of the law. As always, he brings these characters to immediate life through his uncanny ear for dialogue and his matchless ability to create the sustained, rambling dramatic monologues that are so much a part of his narrative technique. In iAt End of Day/i, as in all of Higgins's novels, a succession of characters step into the spotlight and proceed to talk, gradually revealing their histories and circumstances, their essential natures, and the shape and direction of their circumscribed lives. pMonologue follows monologue, each one amplifying, illuminating -- sometimes even contradicting -- the ones that have come before. Together, they create a coherent picture of the predatory universe that most of Higgins's characters call home.pThe inhabitants of this universe include FBI agents Jack Farrier and Darren Stoat, the latest inheritors of the McKeach/Cistaro relationship; Jim Dowd and Emmett Naughton, Boston policemen who are ignorant of the relationship and have their own independent agendas to pursue; Todd Naughton, Emmett's son, who is drawn simultaneously to the world of the cop and the world of the criminal; Tim Sexton, a paraplegic Vietnam vet who conceives an astonishing plan for accumulating and distributing prescription medications; and Max Rascob, a former public accountant who is forced -- as a result of a single, irrevocable mistake -- to throw in his lot with Arthur McKeach and Nick Cistaro. These and other equally vital characters -- all of them bound together by blood, circumstances, or a sense of common cause -- light up the novel, and are as effortlessly, seamlessly real as an overheard conversation in a corner bar.piAt End of Day/i is George V. Higgins at the top of his form and may be his most successful novel since his 1987 masterpiece, iOutlaws/i. No one understood the world of modern urban hoodlums better than Higgins. No one reproduced the scatological rhythms of their everyday speech with the same reportorial accuracy. George V. Higgins died much too soon, and he will be greatly missed. Fortunately for all of us, he left behind a varied, voluminous body of work that includes two dozen novels, a collection of short stories, and several volumes of cogent nonfiction. These 30 books, though not all uniformly excellent, constitute a large and singular accomplishment. The best of them -- such as iOutlaws/i, iThe Friends of Eddie Coyle/i, iCogan's Trade/i, iThe Digger's Game/i, and, of course, his swan song, iAt End of Day/i -- will be read, admired, and remembered for a very long time to come.P#151;Bill Sheehan

They were a handful of leftover student radicals from the turbulent 60's - brilliant renegade children of affluence, financing their reign of urban terror through a series of daring armored car robberies. For nearly a decade they avoided capture, until justice final triumphed in the wake of a brutal mass murder in downtown Boston. But for the killers' families, the police, the obsessed young Assistant D.A., and the city itself, the nightmare was far from over. . . it had only just begun.

Earl Beale, a former college basketball star with a prison record, enters into a corrupt scheme in order to pay off a debt and soon finds himself in the sleazy underworld of crooked cops

Federal Agent Pete Riordan has two problems, and both of them could end with murder.Convicted killer Mikey-mike Magro has never made a secret of the fact that if he ever gets out of jail, he's going to go after the man he thinks put him there, Jerry 'Digger' Doherty. And now it seems some very influential people are trying to get Magro pardoned and out on the street.Riordan figures Bishop Paul Doherty, an old friend who also happens to be the Digger's brother, might put him on the right track - and he might just be able to help him with his second problem too: word is that a man is over from the old country intending to buy arms for the IRA. No one knows his name, or even what he looks like, but Riordan needs to find him fast - or his two problems could come together like a lighted fuse and a stick of gelignite.

Hard-drinking, hard-up attorney Jerry Kennedy takes on a case that nobody else will touch, that of defending a once-powerful commissioner of public works who has been involved in one shady deal after another. Reprint.

Bob Brennan is an old-school Boston cop who knows a lot about Short Joey Mossi, a mob hit man who's neatly taken care of at least eleven competitors. In fact, as Harry Dell'Appa, a hotshot detective recalled from banishment in the sticks, discovers, Brennan not only knows a lot, but he talks a lot, too - about who Joey's killed and about how and why. So why won't Brennan bring Joey in? That's what Harry has to find out.

Presents a practical guide to good writing and reading for the talented but inexperienced writer seeking to publish

For low-life Boston lawyer Jerry Kennedy, everything's gone sour--his client Louis Schwartz is in jail, he's a prey of the IRS, and his wife is giving him the silent treatment

Dust jacket shows very light shelf wear at the edges

The author of 18 remarkable bestsellers, George V. Higgins is back with a stunning new story of a big-league Bay State contractor who hired ex-cons, operated on the raw edge of the law, and knew a secret that could blow the lid off a long-hidden political scandal. Or so Justice Department prosecutors thought when they began building a case of bribery against self-made millionaire Ken Farley.

Joe Corey, a disillusioned Manhattan corporate lawyer, teams up with retired Defense Department bigshot Baldo Ianucci to solve a twenty-three-year-old murder--that of his wife's grandfather, who was killed with his own shotgun

Appointed by former classmate Judge Henry Lawler to prosecute the boyfriend of a murdered woman, Jerry Kennedy has difficulty proving the guilt of the defendant, a more than likely suspect, when the victim's body is discovered long after her death

Lieutenant Francis Clay is drawn into a sleazy cut-throat world obsessed with money, fame and power when successful sports agent Alexander Drouhin is murdered. A crime novel from the author of A CHANGE OF GRAVITY and WONDERFUL YEARS, WONDERFUL YEARS.

Why do certain professional athletes achieve immortality and others don't? With his sparkling, accurate prose, Higgins suggests some answers as he tells us about baseball and the ever-trying Boston Red Sox, about family and continuity and the passage of the seasons, delightfully weaving them all together with his insightful observations.

Hardback with scuffing on jacket, some further light wear to edges, minor edgewear to boards, very slight crease to spine. Contents clean and sound throughout. TPW

Mark Baldwin, a wealthy newspaper owner, hires Connie Gates to pretend to be an investigative reporter in order to get close to Joe Logan, and determine what information he will reveal at his trial about Baldwin

A New York Times Notable Book

Hard Cover; Very Good; Dust Jacket - Very Good; Alfred A. Knopf First Edition / First Printing. Hardcover, Very Good cloth covered boards with light edge wear and fading. Textblock is tight and clean. DJ is Very Good with light edge wear and sunned spine. Page top edges dyed grey.

Aboard a deluxe ocean liner, a middle-aged couple with financial and marital problems are pigeonholed by a charming confidence man with a mission, and the three exchange revealing stories about their lives. 25,000 first printing. $20,000 first printing.

Higgins, George V., Friends Of Richard Nixon, The

A Year or So With Edgar [Hardcover]

George V. Higgins, the poet laureate of Boston’s criminal underworld, has written such classics of the genre as Cogan’s Trade, At the End of the Day, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle—the inspiration for the classic Robert Mitchum film. His dystopic Boston is filled with low-down hoods, crooked fuzz, and ruthless crime bosses, all brought to life by Higgins’s trademark a pitch-perfect rendering of the criminal vernacular that hits as hard and cuts as deep as the brass knuckles and switchblades wielded by his creations. The Easiest Thing in the World is a riveting collection comprised of stories, film treatments, and two never-before-published novellas. It’s the kind of stuff we’ve come to expect from tales of corruption and revenge, wrapped in sizzling dialogue and a wicked sense of humor. The Easiest Thing in the World is an indispensable addition to not only the Higgins library but also the canon of American crime fiction.

This analysis and warning about the dangerous mix of politics and media manipulation examines the sixteen-year mayoral term of Boston's Kevin White in terms of the critical problems plaguing modern cities and government

New Book. Atlantic-Little Brown; First Edition ~1st Printing Edition (1977). Hardcover, includes dust jacket. Ships within 24 hours. Great Customer Service.