Matt Scudder is finally leading a comfortable life. The crime rate’s down and the stock market’s up. Gentrification’s prettying up the old neighborhood. The New York streets don’t look so mean anymore.

Then all hell breaks loose.

Scudder quickly discovers the spruced-up sidewalks are as mean as ever—dark and gritty and stained with blood. He’s living in a world where the past is a minefield, the present is a war zone, and the future’s an open question. It’s a world where nothing is certain and nobody’s safe, a random universe where no one’s survival can be taken for granted—not even his own. A world where everybody dies.

A New York Times and Publishers Weekly Notable Book

HOPE TO DIE

A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

When a prominent Manhattan couple is killed in a brutal home invasion, the whole city catches its breath. A few days later, their killers turn up dead behind a locked door in Brooklyn. One has killed his partner, then himself.

The city sighs with relief. The cops close the case.

Private investigator Matt Scudder and his wife were in the same room with the couple just hours before their death, and in spite of himself, Scudder is drawn to the case. The closer he looks, the more he senses the presence of a third man, a puppet master who manipulated his two accomplices, then cut their strings when he was done with them.

The villain who looms in the shadows is cold and diabolical, murdering for pleasure and profit. Nobody but Scudder even suspects he exists—and he’s not done killing.

He’s just getting started ...

Praise

A frightened hooker named Kim asked private investigator Matthew Scudder to help her get out of “the Life.” Now she’s dead, slashed to ribbons in a high-rise hotel. Finding her killer will be Scudder’s penance. But there are lethal secrets hiding in Kim’s past that are far dirtier than her trade—and many ways to die in this cruel and dangerous town.

EIGHT MILLION
WAYS TO DIE

“First rate in all ways.”
New York Times

“Lawrence Block is a master ... The Matthew Scudder novels are among the finest detective books penned in this century.”
Jonathan Kellerman

“Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett still cast long shadows across the mystery genre. If there’s one crime writer currently capable of matching their noirish legacies, it’s Lawrence Block.”
San Francisco Chronicle

“One of the best-written and most thought-provoking private eye series since the mid-’70s ... [and] EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE is the best book in the series.”
Arizona Daily Star

“Superlative ... One of the very best writers now working the beat ... Block has done something new and remarkable with the private eye novel.”
Wall Street Journal

“It offers a first-rate plot and wry ruminations on the vagaries and randomness of death.”
Los Angeles Times