Showing results by author "Robert L. Fish"

They were the murder league, a group dedicated to committing any murder for anyone. For the small sum of 1,000 pounds, the group would perform the killing for whatever the reason - love, hate, money, fun. All the client had to do was drop a line in their post box and the deal was done.

At an international summit, Da Silva searches for an assassin. Off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, a freighter battles the waves. The steward has been stricken with appendicitis, but the sea is too rough for the ship to dock. A coast guard helicopter brings him to shore, where he is put in an ambulance and rushed the hospital. But when the ambulance arrives, the patient has disappeared. He was never sick, and he is not a sailor. He is an assassin, and he's vanished into thin air.

On a Dutch plantation in South Africa, two bored children are throwing rocks when their mother calls them inside and notices that one of her sons is holding a glittering, uncut diamond. These two children do not know it, but they have changed the course of a continent forever. When word reaches Europe that there are diamonds in South Africa just waiting to be plucked from the ground, men and women of all nations race south to make their fortune.

To protect a witness, a loose cannon of a cop takes on the whole mob. Clancy doesn't care that the shooter is a witness in an important trial. All he knows is that the guy has a gun - and no one pulls a gun on Lieutenant Clancy of the NYPD. Shooting the state's witness earns Clancy a transfer to the backwater 52nd Precinct. To get his career on track, he is forced to accept a humiliating assignment: babysitting mob kingpin Johnny Rossi while he waits to testify before the crime commission.

In search of a missing treasure, Da Silva returns to an old case. Off the island of Barbados, the crew of a Brazilian ocean liner strains to hear the sounds of Carnival coming from shore. A small boat pulls alongside, and a band of steel drummers offer to play for them. As they make their rounds on the ship, the bandleader slips away. He pistol whips one of the crew, forcing him to open the ship's safe, and escapes before the song has ended, taking half a million dollars in gems with him.

When a daffy young American comes to Rio de Janeiro in search of her missing brother, Captain José Da Silva does his best to stay out of it. But when her search draws her into the mystery of the bridge that went nowhere, Da Silva will have to risk a jungle expedition of his own to save her life.

The thousand-year Reich is crumbling, and the Red Army races toward Berlin. As the senior leadership of the Nazi party burns its files and flees the country, Colonel Helmut von Schraeder takes a different approach. After years in charge of the concentration camp at Lublin, he knows the Russians will not spare him. And so he throws away his uniform and asks a plastic surgeon to give him a disguise no one will question: that of a Jew.

A quartet of kidnappers make the mistake of hiring Da Silva as their driver. Chico Xavier needs cash. His father has cut off his allowance, and for a university student with expensive taste - and an even more expensive girlfriend - this is a death sentence. And so he and his friends arrange to kidnap one of their school chums: a fellow dilettante who lets himself be taken in exchange for a cut of the ransom. Two days of criminal behavior, Chico thinks, and they'll all live happily ever after - or die in the Rio sand.

A fraud case leads Da Silva on a wild search across Brazil. It's snowing in New York, and Jimmy Martin is pleading for his life. He owes a loan shark $100,000, but he knows he will make his fortune if he can just hop a plane to Brazil. The lender gives him a 30-day extension, and Jimmy is on his way. But he will find Brazil a better place in which to end a life than to save one.

A Holocaust survivor fights a Nazi conspiracy in the jungles of Brazil. In 1939, Erick Von Roesler was spreading Hitler's gospel in Brazil when duty to the Reich called him home. He distinguished himself during the war, organizing slave labor camps, overseeing executions, and manning the gas chambers of Buchenwald, but in 1945 he felt it necessary to leave the land of his birth. His enthusiasm for the German cause undimmed, he returned to South America to remake the continent in the image of the fallen Reich.

It is 1948, and few in Belgium live comfortably enough to haggle over payment - particularly those who make their living outside the law. Kek Huuygens is an exception. As far as his wife knows, this dapper gentleman is an art appraiser who moves in the finest circles. But although Kek knows all there is to know about art, he does not appraise it. He moves it - from one thief to another. Kek is the finest smuggler in Europe, and he charges accordingly. After all, his wife has expensive taste.

A gang of assassins draw Da Silva into Brazil's rugged interior. George Chaney may have been raised in the roughest neighborhoods of the United States, but he's never been anywhere quite as dangerous as Paraíso. Although booming with petrodollars, this rugged city in the Brazilian wastelands is still a frontier town at heart. On the run from the mob, Chaney comes here in search of sanctuary. He will find that though the city's name means paradise, its reality is much closer to hell.

A traveler is murdered in Rio for the sake of a stuffed snake. The man in white has money to fly, but he boards a bus instead. It takes hours for the rickety old bus to snake down the Brazilian coast, and the man arrives in Rio de Janeiro well after midnight. He is on his way to make his fortune when he spots the killers following him and knows is life is through. A few hours after dawn, the man in white is brought to the city morgue.

Berlin is lost, but the Nazis have not given up hope. As their soldiers battle the Red Army for every inch of the capital, a detachment of Russians search the bunker underneath the Berlin Zoo, where Hitler's army stored the finest art treasures of the Reich. The bunker is empty by the time Sergeant Kolenko enters it - save for a rusted, old trunk that holds nothing but gold knickknacks. Kolenko's men don't know it yet, but they have unearthed the treasures of the lost city of Troy.

Another installment in the Murder League, this time ex-detectives Carruthers, Simpson, and Briggs fall prey to inept kidnappers Clarence Alexander and Harold Nishbagel. Of course, the situation is quickly overturned and the captives bring the kidnappers to their knees.

In the aftermath of World War II, young couples stroll through Brussels, but they do not speak of love. Instead they might talk about papers, passports, or relocation - and most of all, they speak of currency. As Europe rebuilds itself, fortunes are made and lost in hours, and money is worthless until it is converted into dollars.

A New York cop goes after an escaped prisoner with murder on his mind. For a hit-and-run with a stolen car, Lenny Cervera bought himself five to 10 in Sing Sing. When his sentence comes down, this two-bit thug vows revenge on everyone who helped put him there. He swears to kill the judge, the district attorney, and the cop who cuffed him: Lieutenant Clancy, the toughest detective in the NYPD.