Crime Does Not Pay #71

A ruthless killer-for-hire named Hank Charters builds a murder racket, offering his services to the highest bidder—but his cold calculation crumbles when a seemingly simple job for a mob boss goes wrong, leaving him framed and arrested. As Hank tries to maintain control of his criminal operation from behind bars, his own gang turns against him in a brutal betrayal that seals his fate. This hard-boiled true crime tale delivers the kind of double-cross and grim reckoning that made Crime Does Not Pay required reading for anyone who wanted to see why the underworld always eats its own.

In 1928 Grant City, racketeer Zeke Toller arrives looking to muscle in on local kingpin Vince Bonita's operation, and a police detective named Kane gets caught between them—literally in Bonita's pocket when a bribe goes wrong. As Toller tightens his grip on the town through violence and intimidation, Bonita hatches a desperate scheme to turn Toller's own men against him, but the plan spirals into betrayal and bloodshed that nobody saw coming. It's a hard-boiled tale of small-time hustlers and big-time stakes where nobody walks away clean.

When a state trooper is gunned down on a Pacific coast highway in 1947, Chief Collins launches an all-out manhunt fueled by the unwritten law: death to cop-killers. As the investigation intensifies through roadblocks, aerial searches, and witness accounts, the net closes around a desperate suspect with everything to lose. The killer's only choice becomes whether he'll be taken alive or make his final stand.

When a murder suspect named Marina claims an airtight alibi—he was thirty miles away when the crime occurred—detectives turn to an ingenious forensic technique called moulage, developed by Dr. Alphonse Poller, to create precise three-dimensional castings of physical evidence from the crime scene. By casting molds of tire tracks and footprints found at the victim's home, investigators uncover details that challenge Marina's story in ways photographs never could.

When blackmailer Link Grantley is found dead in his apartment, Detective Shirer must sort through a web of suspects who all had reason to want him gone—but the crime scene itself raises troubling questions that point to murder, not suicide. With six people who knew and despised Grantley, each harboring secrets he'd exploited, Shirer must piece together the clues to find which of them crossed the line from victim to killer. Can you solve the case before the detective does?