Lady, Go Die!

March 26, 2012
A clever, fast-moving plot drives Collins’s gritty fifth posthumous collaboration with MWA Grand Master Spillane (after 2011’s The Consummata), which picks up about a year after the events of the debut Hammer novel, I, the Jury (1947). Late one night while on a weekend getaway in the Long Island town of Sidon, the cop-turned-PI and his bombshell secretary, Velda, spot three goons “kicking the hell out of little guy” in an alley. Hammer recognizes one of the three as Dekkert, a crooked cop he once knew. Now with the Sidon police, Dekkert claims, right before Hammer decks him, that he’s pursuing leads to a missing woman, Sharron Wesley, who’s done time for the manslaughter of her husband. When Wesley’s nude corpse turns up shortly afterward, posed on a horse statue, Hammer investigates. Once again, Collins displays his mastery of Spillane’s distinctive two-fisted prose. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency.