The Killing Man

When you start reading, you smile: "Some days hang over Manhattan like a huge pair of unseen pincers, slowly squeezing the city until you can hardly breathe. A low growl of thunder echoed up the cavern of Fifth Avenue and I looked up to where the sky started at the seventy-first floor of the Empire State Building. I could smell the rain. It was the kind that hung above the orderly piles of concrete until it was soaked with dust and debris and when it came down it wasn't rain at all, but the sweat of the city." If you're old enough to recognize the voice, you know that the "I" is Mike Hammer; and you guess, rightly, that since the verbal skills are back, so are the skills in love and detection. If you're too young to know Hammer from anything but the television series, you realize you're in for a treat - and what a special treat it is! For from the moment that Hammer walks into his office to find his beloved secretary, Velda, knocked unconscious and a strange man brutally murdered, occupying the office chair, you're in for one of the fasted-paced, sexiest, most brilliantly plotted adventures the great detective has ever encountered, a tale that leads from the discovery of a mysterious toolbox through involvement with a drug ring, two smashingly beautiful women and the CIA, to a last-page showdown with the villain that could only come from the mind of Mickey Spillane. In a 'Time' magazine survey done in 1968 of best-selling books published in this century, seven of the top twenty-five were by Mickey Spillane. 'The Killing Man' demonstrates why. In 1947, Spillane introduced the world to Mike Hammer in his first book, 'I, the Jury'. 'The Killing Man' is the twelfth Mike Hammer novel and the first since 1970. Spillane, who has been described as "the most widely read writer in the history of all mankind", has written a total of twenty-four books, with total worldwide sales in excess of 130 million.