A GRAVE UNDERTAKING Earl Cradle has put together the perfect bank heist. He’s got a safecracker, a gunman, some extra muscle—and a crooked undertaker. All the details are set. They’ll access the bank from the funeral home next door and hit the bank when it opens, then escape as part of a funeral procession. All they need is a body. When Earl discovers that a bowery bum has just died and is laying in the morgue, he has his girlfriend claim the body as her father. There’s only one problem. Newspaperman Jake Epstein has been researching this death, and discovers that the bum is a disgraced professor, with a real daughter. And she wants to know what the hell has happened to her father’s body! OBSESSION Conrad Madden is out of work and irritated at his wife and kids when he takes the babysitter home that night. Which is no excuse for getting drunk and spending the night with her. But how could he know that he would wake up to a corpse in the living room the next morning? The babysitter, Allie, claims the man was going to kill him while he slept. It was self-defense. She had to kill him. If Madden wasn’t falling for the young woman, becoming obsessed with her, he could call the cops. He probably should call the cops. But there's the suitcase full of cash to consider. Now he is on the run, trying to keep one step ahead of the cops—and the hoods whose suitcase Allie has stolen. “He is at his best detailing the step-by-step planning of a crime, the crime itself, and its aftermath… For unadorned action, suspense, and vigorous storytelling his novels have seldom been surpassed.”—Bill Crider, 20th Century Crime & Mystery Writers “…his plots are sharp and relentless.”—Ben Boulden "When compared to Lionel White's contemporaries, this author remains in the very top echelon of mid-20th Century crime-noir creators.”—Paperback Warrior Lionel White was born July 9, 1905 in New York City. He started his career as a police reporter and true crime magazine editor, and turned those experiences toward fiction writing with his first novel, The Snatchers, in 1953, about a failed kidnapping. He wrote more than 35 books, many of them translated into different languages and turned into films like The Night of the Following Day, The Money Trap, The Big Caper, Pierrot le Fou and perhaps most famously, The Killing, adapted by Stanley Kubrick from White’s novel, Clean Break. He was considered the master of the big caper, and was credited by director Quentin Tarantino with the inspiration for his film, Reservoir Dogs. White died December 26, 1985, in Asheville, North Carolina.