Savage Night

From "best suspense writer going, bar none" a noir novel about an assassin who becomes romantically involved with the women in his next victim's life (New York Times).

Jake Winroy had no looks, no education, and little else before he'd worked his way to the top of a million-dollar-a-month horse-betting ring. But when the state's latched onto his game, the feds take a bite and the lawyer fees eat away at the rest, all Jake's got left is the bottle and a beautiful wife whose every word is ugly.

Jake's to be the top witness in a major case against organized crime. But an enigmatic mafioso known only as The Man has a plan to make dead certain Jake never gets the chance to testify.

The Man's hired Charlie "Little" Bigger, a hit man barely five feet tall, to infiltrate the Winroy residence as a tenant and murder Winroy in cold blood. To Little, it seems like the easiest job on Earth. Until he lays eyes on the beautiful and dangerous Fay and the Winroy's young housemaid Ruth, a woman as sensual as she is vulnerable. Savage Night is Jim Thompson at his most unpredictable and deeply suspenseful, in a claustrophobic thriller of one man's fractured mind. Praise for Jim Thompson

"Blisteringly imaginative." —Kirkus Reviews

"My favorite crime novelist. Often imitated, but never duplicated." —Stephen King

"If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it . . . His work . . . casts a dazzling light on the human condition." —Washington Post

"The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction." —Chicago Tribune