Maxima Library

“When you break the law, you can forget about playing the averages because you have to win all the time.”

Madox is new to town when he hatches a scheme to rob the bank. At the same time, he's having an affair with his boss's wife and has the hots for the loan officer at the used car lot where he works. The robbery goes as smoothly as it can but Madox's life goes spiraling out of control in a web of sex, murder, and blackmail.

Angelina was born to trouble, and most of it was men.

A son searches for the men who killed his mysterious father

Even at sixty-six, Gunnar Romstead was a tough old salt. It took several men to bring him down, and even after they’d bound his feet and hands he was still a threat. But finally the man who’d survived waterfront brawls, World War II, and countless stormy nights at sea died on his knees—shot through the back of the head.  Looking for answers, his son Eric comes to the barren California town where Gunnar breathed his last. He hardly knew the old man, but he can’t believe his father was killed in a botched drug deal. Somewhere in California is a massive shipment of heroin and a quarter of a million dollars, and if Eric finds them he will uncover the truth. But for a boy who grew up loving his father from afar, the truth may hurt even more than a bullet.

Pulp fiction has been looked down on as a guilty pleasure, but it offers the perfect form of entertainment: the very best storytelling filled with action, surprises, sound and fury. In short, all the exhiliration of a roller-coaster ride. The 1920s in America saw the proliferation of hundreds of dubiously named but thrillingly entertaining pulp magazines in America: Black Mask, Amazing, Astounding, Spicy Stories, Ace-High, Detective Magazine, Dare-Devil Aces. It was in these luridly-coloured publications, printed on the cheapest pulp paper, that the first gems began to appear. The one golden rule for writers of pulp fiction was to adhere to the art of storytelling. Each story had to have a beginning, an end, economically-etched characters, but plenty going on, both in terms of action and emotions. Pulp magazines were the TV of their day, plucking readers from drab lives and planting them firmly in thrilling make-believe, successors...