Red Harvest

A hired man with no name walks into a town with no conscience.The Continental Op is sent to Personville-"Poisonville" to anyone who lives long enough to talk-where the mines run on graft, the police answer to the highest bidder, and rival gangs carve the streets into fiefdoms. He was supposed to straighten out a newspaper editor's murder. Instead, he finds a civic disease so deep that only a bloodletting will cure it. Playing thugs, tycoons, and crooked officials against one another, the Op turns the town's greed inward, stoking a war that will either scour Poisonville clean-or burn it to the ground with him in it.Brutal, lean, and diamond-hard, Red Harvest is Dashiell Hammett at his purest: a relentless engine of suspense and a cold-eyed autopsy of American corruption. This is the book that defined hard-boiled fiction-where justice isn't blind, it's armed, and the only rule is to finish the job.