Red Harvest

<p><em>A hired man with no name walks into a town with no conscience.</em></p><p>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.</p><p>Brutal lean and diamond-hard <strong><em>Red Harvest</em></strong> 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.</p>