Max Allan Collins has 56 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 17 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 12 ratings. The most-rated is Scarface and the Untouchable.
Scarface and the Untouchable
Summary
A thrilling magnum opus on America's great crime epic A Mystery Writers of America “Grand Master” - author of the gangster classic Road to Perdition, longtime Dick Tracy writer, and multiple Shamus Award winner - teams with an acclaimed rising young historian in this riveting, myth-shattering dual portrait of Al Capone, America’s most notorious gangster, and Eliot Ness, the legendary Prohibition agent whose extraordinary investigative work crippled his organization. Written with novelistic pacing and underpinned by groundbreaking research, Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz's Scarface and the Untouchable delivers - at last - the definitive account of the “Battle for Chicago”, the iconic struggle between the mythic yet real combatants who have captivated the world for 90 years.
©2018 Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
True Detective
Summary
In the mob-choked Chicago of 1932, private detective Nathan Heller may be willing to risk his life to earn a Depression dollar, but he never sacrifices his sardonic wit. Now, author Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition) reissues the contemporary classic that introduces the wise-cracking Nathan Heller in all his guts and glory. When Mayor Cermak’s “Hoodlum Squad” brings Heller along on a raid with no instructions but to keep his mouth shut and his gun handy, he becomes an unwitting, unwilling part of a hit on Al Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti. As a result, Heller quits the force to become a private eye. His first job: head off a nation-shaking political assassination in Miami Beach. With the Chicago World’s Fair as a backdrop, Heller encounters a ragtag array of crooks and clients, including Al Capone, George Raft, “Dutch” Reagan, and FDR himself. Rich in riveting plot turns, including a heartbreaking romance, True Detective is one of the most highly entertaining and unlikely coming-of-age stories ever written. That’s why mystery fans and critics alike rank this historical thriller at the top of their lists - and why the book swept up a Shamus Award for the best novel from the Private Eye Writers of America.
©2011 Max Allan Collins (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Last Stand
Summary
On Mickey Spillane's 100th Birthday - A Brand-new Novel from the Master When legendary mystery writer Mickey Spillane died in 2006, he left behind the manuscript of one last novel he'd just completed: The Last Stand. He asked his friend and colleague (and fellow Mystery Writers of America Grand Master) Max Allan Collins to take responsibility for finding the right time and place to publish this final book. Now, on the hundredth anniversary of Spillane's birth, his millions of fans will at last get to listen to The Last Stand, together with a second never-before-published work, this one from early in Spillane's career: the feverish crime novella A Bullet for Satisfaction. A tarnished former cop goes on a crusade to find a politician's killer and avoid the .45-caliber slug with his name on it. A pilot forced to make an emergency landing in the desert finds himself at the center of a struggle between FBI agents, unsavory fortune hunters, and members of the local Indian tribe to control a mysterious find that could mean wealth and power - or death. Two substantial new works filled with Spillane's muscular prose and the gorgeous women and two-fisted action the author was famous for, topped off by an introduction from Max Allan Collins describing the history of these lost manuscripts and his long relationship with the writer who was his mentor, his hero, and for much of the last century, the best-selling author in the world.
©2018 Mickey Spillane Publishing, LLC (P)2020 Journalstone
Quarry's List
Summary
Killer-for-hire Quarry is trying to lie low when he gets a midnight visit from two gunmen sent by an old associate. Someone wants Quarry off the scene - for keeps. This early crime novel by the author of The Road to Perdition shows once again that nobody is harder-boiled than Quarry. With a new afterword by the author.
©2011 Max Allan Collins (P)2013 Audible Inc.
Flying Blind
Summary
In 1935, Nate Heller is hired to escort Amelia Earhart on a speaking tour because of numerous cut-and-paste death threats against her life. Heller suspects the threats are a stunt by Earhart's publicity-hungry husband, and the detective’s growing closeness to the bisexual aviatrix leads to a steamy affair. Two years later, when Earhart embarks on her flight around the world - and mysteriously disappears over the South Pacific - Uncle Sam enlists Heller in a clandestine search of Japanese waters for the popular Earhart... and the top-secret plane she was flying. Blending the unsolved mystery and historical facts swirling around Earhart’s disappearance with Heller’s sarcastic wit, Max Allan Collins delivers another riveting tale of intrigue and betrayal, taking Heller far from his native Chicago. As he investigates, Heller discovers a treacherous plot involving marital betrayal and the U.S. government. Heller’s secret undercover mission leads him to Saipan, where Earhart is believed to be held prisoner. Nate’s heartbreaking attempted rescue leads the detective to return, many years later, to extract his final revenge.
©2012 Max Allan Collins (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Pearl Harbor Murders
Summary
Two nights before the devastating military strike on Pearl Harbor, a young half-Japanese singer is found dead on a Honolulu beach. The murder appears to be a simple crime of passion, but writer Edgar Rice Burroughs - creator of Tarzan and John Carter - has his doubts. The writer’s suspicions lead him and his son Hully to conduct a sub-rosa investigation into the sultry singer’s death. Their pursuit of the killer coincides with growing rumors of an imminent Japanese attack against the Pacific fleet stationed in Oahu. Was the victim - who had links to both military officers and suspected spies - harboring a key piece of intelligence? With the clock ticking toward infamy, the intrepid father-son team races to crack the case in this compelling historical thriller.
©2012 Max Allan Collins (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Bye Bye, Baby
Summary
Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate goddess of the silver screen, is at the peak of her popularity, internationally famous, universally admired by women and desired by men. But she’s also famously insecure and temperamental and is being pilloried in the press for delaying the production of Something’s Got to Give. When the head of Twentieth Century Fox threatens to cancel her contract, Monroe hires “PI to the stars” Nathan Heller to tap her phones and record calls that might affect legal action.
Less than three months later, Monroe is dead from an overdose and, officially, a suicide. But Heller isn’t buying it. He knows that in the weeks before, the star was anything but suicidal. He knows, too, about her affair with JFK, about the secret connections between the Kennedys and the Mob… and about Bobby Kennedy’s blood feud with Jimmy Hoffa. In short, Heller knows too much to accept this bum rap on a beautiful, gifted woman.
So he investigates, though his efforts might enrage some very famous, very powerful, very dangerous people. But they can’t keep Heller from finding out the astounding truth behind Marilyn Monroe’s untimely demise….
©2011 Max Allan Collins (P)2011 Brilliance Audio
Neon Mirage
Summary
In 1946 Chicago, Nathan Heller - president of the flourishing A-1 Detective Agency - is hired to protect racing-wire gambling chief James Ragen, who is nonetheless shot down on the streets of Chicago. Not one to take such an affront sitting down, Nate goes after the killer, but he’s in for the biggest surprise of his career. Demonstrating once again that he is the master of true-crime fiction, Max Allan Collins’ story of the birth of Las Vegas - and the dirty deeds that floated all around it - is a masterpiece of modern noir. Heller follows the trail as it leads to Hollywood and Las Vegas, specifically to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, but when he proves Siegel’s innocence, Heller and the suave gangster wind up friends... and rivals for the love of Nate’s life. Bugsy hires Heller as security chief of the under-construction Flamingo hotel, where mob bag woman Virginia Hill is a dangerous, if glamorous, distraction. It all comes to a boil with a shocking mob assassination in Beverly Hills that sends Heller into fever-dream ride of vengeance.
©2011 Mac Allan Collins (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Last Stage to Hell Junction
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Max Allan Collins again brings to life the legacy of crime-writing legend Mickey Spillane in another explosive chapter in this now-classic western saga. Caleb York has a tin star, a blazing gun, and plenty of courage. All he needs is a little luck to deliver big justice.... On a lively night at the Victory saloon in Trinidad, New Mexico, Sheriff Caleb York interrupts his poker game to settle a minor dust-up that raises the stakes into major trouble. The wounded miscreant he ushers to the hoosegow spills the secret behind the mysterious disappearance of a certain stage coach. Bound for Denver, the stage carried three important passengers - beautiful ranch owner Willa Cullen, lovely temptress Rita Filley, and wealthy banker Raymond L. Parker. The two women are rivals for the lawman's love, while Parker is a key investor in Trinidad's future. But all are gone, with only the corpses of fellow passengers as bullet-ridden clues. York follows a trail of blood to a ghost town known as Hell Junction. To rescue his lady friends and the banker, he must infiltrate an outlaw den...and pray no one among the thieves, killers, and kidnappers will recognize him. With only his desert rat deputy to back him up, York must free the captives, round up the badmen - and, whenever necessary, send them straight to Hell.
©2019 Mickey Spillane Publishing Inc. (P)2019 Recorded Books
Carnal Hours
Summary
In July 1943, Nate Heller flies to Nassau where multimillionaire Sir Harry Oakes wants dirt dug up on Count De Marigny, the playboy who has married Harry’s beautiful, underage daughter, Nancy. But the investigation has barely begun when Sir Harry turns up dead in bed - burned to death in a real-life locked-room mystery - and Heller is soon working for Nancy, whose husband faces murder charges. Chicago P.I. Heller is on his most intriguing - and dangerous - mission yet in this devilishly clever thriller filled with surprising twists and sharp turns. With the world at war, the peaceful Bahamas provide an ironic, idyllic backdrop for Nazis, the mafia, and two lovely women: one a native girl, the other an aristocratic Englishwoman. Heller is aided by a certain British secret service agent (“Fleming... Ian Fleming”), and encounters along the way the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Meyer Lanksy, and Perry Mason’s creator, Erle Stanley Gardner.
©2011 Max Allan Collins (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Better Dead
Summary
It's the early 1950s. Ju McCarthy is campaigning to rid America of the Red Menace. Nate Heller is doing legwork for the senator, though the Chicago detective is disheartened by McCarthy's witch-hunting tactics. He's made friends with a young staffer, Bobby Kennedy, while trading barbs with a potential enemy, the attorney Roy Cohn, who rubs Heller the wrong way. Not the least of which for successfully prosecuting the so-called Atomic Bomb spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. When famous mystery writer Dashiell Hammett comes to Heller representing a group of showbiz and literary leftists who are engaged in a last minute attempt to save the Rosenbergs, Heller decides to take on the case. Heller will have to play both sides to do this, and when McCarthy also tasks Heller to find out what the CIA has on him, Heller reluctantly agrees. His main lead is an army scientist working for the CIA who admits to Heller that he's been having misgivings about the work he's doing and elliptically referring to the Cold War making World War II look like a tea party. And then the scientist goes missing.
©2016 Max Allan Collins (P)2016 Recorded Books
Ask Not
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Max Allan Collins has won multiple Shamus Awards for his detective novels featuring Nathan Heller. The third book in his JFK trilogy, Ask Not finds Heller investigating a bizarre string of deaths among the witnesses to JFK’s assassination—and tracing blame to LBJ’s right-hand man.
©2013 Max Allan Collins (P)2013 Recorded Books
Girl Most Likely
Summary
It’s never too late for revenge in this thrilling novel by New York Times bestselling and award-winning crime master Max Allan Collins. In a small Midwest town, twenty-eight-year-old Krista Larson has made her mark as the youngest female police chief in the country. She’s learned from the best: her father, Keith, a decorated former detective. But as accustomed as they are to the relative quiet of their idyllic tourist town, things quickly turn with Krista’s ten-year high school reunion. With the out-of-towners holed up in a lakefront lodge, it doesn’t take long to stir up old grudges and resentments. Now a successful TV host, Astrid Lund, voted the “Girl Most Likely to Succeed” - and then some - is back in town. Her reputation as a dogged reporter has made the stunning blonde famous. Her reputation among her former classmates and rivals has made her infamous. Astrid’s list of enemies is a long one. And as the reunion begins, so does a triple murder investigation. Krista and her father are following leads and opening long-locked doors from their hometown to the Florida suburbs to Chicago’s underworld. They just never imagined what would be revealed: the secrets and scandals of Krista’s own past.
©2019 by Max Allan Collins. (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Million-Dollar Wound
Summary
In 1942, Chicago P.I. Nate Heller and his childhood pal, boxer Barney Ross, join the Marines and see bloody action together at Guadalcanal. Upon his return to gangland Chicago, the shell-shocked Heller - more dangerous than ever - is thrust into the midst of an inter-gang war to depose Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti, whose minions are infiltrating Hollywood movie unions. In this crushing finale to rough-and-tumble Nate Heller’s Frank Nitti trilogy, Max Allan Collins delves into the damaged psyche of war veterans as a full-on gangland war threatens to explode. As tempers in Hollywood flare-up, Heller attempts to solve a murder committed behind enemy lines, and deal with the drug addiction of his friend Barney. But not even the company of fan dancer Sally Rand can ease Heller’s conscience as he is haunted by the events at Guadalcanal even as he’s surrounded by the murder and mayhem of Nitti’s final, violent days.
©2011 Max Allan Collins (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Chicago Lightning
Summary
Tough, cynical, and clever, Nathan Heller has been called "the perfect private eye", the best investigator that Chicago (where "lightning" means gunfire) has to offer. Created by New York Times best-selling novelist and Road to Perdition creator Max Allan Collins, the classic PI comes vibrantly to life in this collection of 13 stories, all based on real cases of the 1930s and '40s. In “The Blonde Tigress”, Heller encounters a vicious hold-up crew with a brutal female leader, while in “Scrap” he investigates a union shooting that has national implications. In “The Perfect Crime” he goes Hollywood to protect the lovely Thelma Todd, with tragic results. The private eye finds himself tangling with notorious mobster Mickey Cohen in a “Shoot-out On Sunset” and with Al Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti, in “Screwball". Heller’s friendship with Eliot Ness finds the two men working together in both “The Strawberry Teardrop", in which Heller encounters America’s first serial killer, and “Natural Death, Inc." Heller tackles each case with his trademark cynicism and humor, digging into the grimy underbelly of 20th-century America to uncover the truth at any cost.
©2011 Max Allan Collins (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Complex 90
Summary
When private investigator Mike Hammer accompanies a conservative politician to Moscow on a fact-finding mission, he is arrested and imprisoned by the KGB on a bogus charge. He quickly escapes, creating an international incident by getting into a firefight with Russian agents. On his stateside return, the government is none too happy with Hammer. Russia is insisting upon his extradition, and various government agencies are following him. A question dogs our hero: Why him? Why does Russia want him back, and why was he singled out to accompany the senator to Russia in the first place? The legendary Mike Hammer continues to thrill readers everywhere, even after the passing of his brilliant creator, Mickey Spillane.
©2013 Mickey Spillane Publishing, LLC (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Target Lancer
Summary
1963: John Fitzgerald Kennedy is a lightning rod for public opinion. The handsome, youthful leader, who is prepared to take America into a brighter future, earns love from cheering crowds. But those who oppose his political agenda - including some who consider themselves betrayed by the Kennedy clan - dare to think the unthinkable: kill an American president. Nathan Heller is Chicago’s most celebrated private detective, hobnobbing with Hugh Hefner, getting written up in Life magazine, enjoying the fruits of a long career that began in a one-room office and now is a coast-to-coast agency. When he does a small favor for a friend - who handles PR for the Teamsters - Heller runs into an old West Side mob crony, a small-time hustler named Jack Ruby. And when that friend is found dead, warning signals start to flash. Suddenly Jimmy Hoffa wants to talk to Nate...and so does Hoffa’s arch enemy, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Back in ’61, Heller acted as the reluctant matchmaker in the ungodly marriage between the Mob and the CIA that created the ill-fated, JFK-sanctioned plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. Now JFK is coming to Chicago and Cuban assassins have been reported in the Windy City. RFK appoints Heller as a "consultant" to the local Secret Service, knowing that Nate understands why conspirators might well target the man code-named "Lancer". It’s a big job for a PI. But with a murder to avenge and a mystery to solve, Heller’s up for the challenge. Rigorously researched, fleshing out a little-known but vital piece of the JFK assassination puzzle, Target Lancer is charged with the electric suspense of real events, and is far more truth than fiction.
©2012 Max Allan Collins (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Blood and Thunder
Summary
Presidential candidate - and force of nature - Huey Long, the “Kingfish,” is in fear for his life. After Nathan Heller delivers the former Louisiana governor a bulletproof vest, the Kingfish hires the Chicago private eye to investigate death threats from political rivals. Soon Heller runs head-on into an IRS investigation seeking millions skimmed from state workers for Huey’s “de-duct box”... and into the arms of the ex-governor’s lovely ex-mistress. When the charismatic politician is shot down by a seemingly crazed doctor, Heller gets a new employer - the insurance agency fighting a double-indemnity claim from Long’s widow. Was the Kingfish truly the victim of assassination, or accidentally killed by his own bodyguards? A classic P.I. thriller built on historical fact, Max Allan Collins’ Blood and Thunder showcases Huey Long in all his gaudy glory, while delving deep into the heart of the deadliest swamps of Louisiana’s mob-infested politics.
©2012 Max Allan Collins (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Girl Can't Help It
Summary
A rock band’s reunion is looking more like a farewell tour in a captivating mystery by New York Times best-selling and award-winning crime master Max Allan Collins. No sooner do Hot Rod and the Pistons reunite for their induction into the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame than two band members take a final bow. Both alleged suicides. A tragic way to go out. A bum way for one-hit wonders to be remembered. But it’s Labor Day weekend. The show must go on. With replacements at the ready, the Pistons are back on home turf to headline the first ever Rock and Country Music Fest. Police Chief Krista Larson and her father, Keith, are there listening. And watching. Because they suspect there may be more to the band members’ untimely deaths than anyone else can see. As Krista and Keith navigate the investigation, a dark picture of the band’s rocky history begins to take center stage. As betrayal, revenge, and blackmail start playing out in the present, the father-daughter team fear that this encore may be the band’s finale.
©2020 Max Allan Collins (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Damned in Paradise
Summary
In 1931, Nate Heller - on a leave of absence from the Chicago P.D. - goes to Hawaii to work as an investigator for family friend Clarence Darrow. One of five Honolulu natives accused of the rape of recent bride Thalia Massie has been murdered; facing murder charges are Thalia’s naval officer husband and her socialite mother. Something doesn’t seem right, and Darrow has brought Heller in to get to the bottom of it. A first-rate detective thriller, Max Allan Collins’ Damned in Paradise shimmers with authenticity as it drives inexorably towards its grave conclusion. Heller - aided by Chang Apana, the real-life model for Charlie Chan - determines that while Thalia surely was raped, the identity of her attackers are in question, and the lush tropical setting cannot dispel the morass of bigotry, lies, and revenge through which the young detective must wade to reach the bitter truth.
©2011 Max Allan Collins (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.