Search

A fascinating window in on life in a British maximum security prison, Billy Rags—by the author of Get Carter—is crime fiction at its best: lean, mean, and full of startling psychological depth.It's the 1960s and Billy Cracken is a hard man to keep locked up. An austere and troubled childhood has given way to life as a hardened criminal and now status as one of the most feared prisoners in England. He has been moved from one maximum security prison to the next. Guards and inmates alike fear and begrudgingly respect the powerfully-built Cracken. But a life doing his porridge, even if as a minor celebrity, isn't the one he wants.A girlfriend and a child await Cracken on the outside and he'll stop at nothing to get to them. While plotting his escape he crosses a powerful mobster who vows to make Cracken's life hell, and if nothing else succeeds at making his escape all the more difficult, something the ever-rebellious Cracken defiantly relishes.The follow-up novel to the wildly successful Get Carter, Billy Rags is a fascinating look into the lives of British inmates serving time in a maximum security prison. Lewis manages once again to tell an exciting, action-filled story with a soul—demonstrated most clearly in a series of brilliant flashbacks to Billy's childhood and in the end conjures a character that will remind readers of both Tom Hardy in Bronson and Lee Marvin in Point Blank.

The lost masterwork of British crime icon Ted Lewis—author of Get Carter—is an unnerving tale of paranoia and madness in the heart of the late 1970s London criminal underworld.In London, George Fowler heads a lucrative criminal syndicate that specializes in illegal pornography. Fowler is king, with a beautiful woman at his side and a swanky penthouse office, but his world is in jeopardy. Someone is undermining his empire from within, and Fowler becomes increasingly ruthless in his pursuit of the unknown traitor, trusting an ever smaller set of advisers.Juxtaposed with the terror and violence of Fowler's last days in London is the flash-forward narrative of his hideout bunker in a tiny English beach town, where he skulks during the off-season, trying to salvage his fallen empire. Just as it seems possible for Fowler to rise again, another trigger may cause his total, irreparable unraveling.

Brian Plender is a glittering evil on par with Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley or Jim Thompson's Lou Ford. In Plender the author of Get Carter and GBH delivered a tense and psychologically complex tale of revenge and blackmail that rightfully belongs among crime fictions most chilling ranks. Two men share a common history. Growing up together in the small town of Barton-Upon-Humber in Lincolnshire, England, Peter Knott is everything that Brian Plender wishes he were. Knott is suave, good-looking, an exemplary student and popular. The friendship they maintain is as important to Plender as it is forgettable to Knott, and this eventually leads to a lasting humiliation for Brian. Years later Brian Plender is a dangerous man. A private investigator who specializes in extortion, blackmail, and intimidation, Plender is a manipulative psychopath capable of anything. Knott meanwhile is a man adrift. He is beholden to his wife for money, which he makes taking photographing catalogs for her father's large mail order company. His wandering eye, array of fetishes, and a taste for younger women, has led Knott through a series of sordid affairs. The two haven't met in years so Brian is therefore quite surprised to spot Peter at a seedy bar with a girl too young to be his wife and he decides to follow the pair. Plender relives the humiliations of his youth just as Knott finds himself on the wrong side of the law in the most horrific way imaginable. Starting out as a long-lost friend and slowly, carefully, revealing himself to be anything but that, Brian Plender is a brilliantly macabre invention that readers won't soon forget.