Donald E. Westlake

Cab driver Chet Conway was hoping for a good tip from his latest fare, the sort he could spend....

Hospitalized after a liaison with another man's wife ends in violence, Paul Cole has just one goal: to rebuild his shattered life....

The men in the tan-and-cream Chrysler came with guns blazing. When Ray Kelly woke up in the hospital, it was a month later, he was missing an eye, and his father was dead....

John Dortmunder and company are hired by an U.N. African Ambassador to steal the famed Balabomo Emerald from the hands of a rival African country....

Meehan, a career thief staring at life without parole, is awaiting sentencing at the Manhattan Correctional Center when he is called to a meeting by someone masquerading as his lawyer....

Kelp has a plan, and John Dortmunder knows that means trouble. His friend Kelp is a jinx, and his schemes, no matter how well intentioned, tend to spiral quickly out of control. But this one, Kelp swears, is airtight. He read it in a book. In county lock-up for a traffic charge, Kelp came across...

The Byzantine Fire is much more than a flawless ninety-carat ruby. As a stone, it's worth over a million dollars, a value vastly increased by its pure gold band - but its history is what makes it priceless. A ring that has been fought for with sword and pen and passed from nation to nation by...

John Dortmunder and his gang set out on a treasure hunt for a long-lost chess set. Success is not inevitable with Dortmunder leading the attack, but he's nothing if not persistent....

This rollicking tale of an aging robber who wants to blow up a reservoir "will keep readers laughing" (Publishers Weekly). In his day, Tom was a hard man. He came up with Dillinger in the 1930s, and pulled a lot of high-profile jobs before the state put him away. They meant it to be for good...

Mavis St. Paul had been a rich man's mistress. Now she was a corpse. And every cop in New York City was hunting for the two-bit punk accused of putting a knife in her....

It would take a miracle to keep Dortmunder out of jail. Though he cased the electronics store perfectly, the cops surprised him, turning up in the alley just as he was walking out the back door, a television in each hand. Already a two-time loser, without divine intervention he faces a long...

Specialist in the scam, the con, and the rip-off, Jerry Manelli is running around New York hot on the trail of a priest: a thousand-year-old, two-foot-tall, ugly, misshapen, dancing Aztec priest made of solid gold, with eyes of pure emeralds, worth a million dollars. Somebody stole it from its...

Eluding the law has always been high on Dortmunder's list....

Dortmunder and his gang are determined to split their time, fighting the mob and robbing the rich simultaneously....

It was supposed to be a simple caviar heist. Dortmunder is almost in the building when the alarm sounds, forcing him up the fire escape and onto the roof. He leaps onto the next building, smashing his ankle and landing in the den of the worst kind of creature he can imagine: nuns. Although...

John Dortmunder and his merry band of crooks return to the scene of the crime world in an attempt to steal a fleet of automobiles that would leave the Sultan of Brunei blushing....

Bank robber John Dortmunder puts a set of wheels under a trailer that just happens to be the temporary site of the Capitalists' & Immigrants' Trust and hauls it away....

“I’m a robber,” John Dortmunder says, “not a grave robber.” Yet he soon finds himself in a Long Island cemetery with dirt up to his knees. His old friend Andy Kelp is to blame—Andy and the Internet. For it was while ambling on the Net that Kelp met up with master manipulator Fitzroy...

Here's the book that started it all: A Girl Called Honey - and if listening to the saga of Honor Mercy Bane brings you a small fraction of the fun we had writing it, you'll be back right away to scoop up So Willing and Sin Hellcat....

Al Engel had worked his way up to being Nick Rovito’s right-hand man, near the top of the syndicate. And this was a delicate job that Rovito had given him: retrieving a very important jacket, loaded with heroin, from the fresh grave of the drug mule who was accidentally buried wearing it...