Complex 90

March 11, 2013
Set in 1964, Collins’s seventh posthumous collaboration with iconic hard-boiled author Spillane (after 2012’s Lady, Go Die!) boasts a ridiculously high body count. In chapter one, PI Mike Hammer, who’s been working for American intelligence, admits before a U.S. government committee that he killed 45 Russians in the course of escaping from a Moscow prison and making his way to safety in Turkey. Three months earlier, he accompanied Senator Allen Jasper, a presidential contender in need of a bodyguard, to the Soviet Union, where the KGB arrested Hammer on a bogus charge. As in the Spillane originals, every woman who crosses the detective’s path is both a stunner and eager to jump into bed with him. Hammer’s brutal methods of solving problems translate to espionage as well as they do to street crimes, but this outing offers more of the same old same old rather than anything new or special. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency.

April 1, 2013
Since Spillane's death in 2006, Collins has been busy completing the pulpmaster's unfinished work, including Mike Hammer novels from various moments in the iconic PI's career. This one, a follow-up to The Girl Hunters (1961), is set in 1964. Hammer has just come back from fighting his way across Russia after a bodyguard gig for a conservative senator led to Hammer's abduction by the KGB. But now, it seems, the commies have followed him to New York. But why do they want him? Is it simply revenge for the 45 men he killed while escaping, or something more? Collins has Spillane down cold, from Hammer's manic grin to his charged patter with the lovely Velda. And while there are hints the world is changing, Hammer hasn't changed a bit. He's still an unreconstructed, red-blooded American male who holds lily-livered bureaucrats in sneering contempt. It's an entertaining time-capsule, but a little goes a long way. Are there still fans crying out for new Hammer adventures? And will they pay for them in hardcover? That's a mystery yet to be solved.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2014
Mysteries abound in the next-to-last Mike Hammer novel, left incomplete when Spillane died in 2006 and finished seamlessly by frequent Spillane collaborator Collins. For starters, who's trying to kill Mike? Does his attempted murder have anything to do with a 40-year-old case in which an incarcerated serial killer is claiming to be innocent? Or has someone else found out about the $89 billionyes, you read that right, $89 billionin Mob money that Mike has stashed away in a sealed-off mountain cave? Set in the late 1990s, the book reads like any of Spillane's vintage Hammer novels, with the customary mixture of violence and witty dialogue. Fans of the long-running series (which began with 1947's I, the Jury) should bump this one to the top of their reading lists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)