The Maltese Falcon (Heathen Edition) (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781963228625)

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was an American author widely recognized as the trailblazer of hard-boiled detective fiction with his unsentimental, breakneck storytelling chock-full of fast-paced, slangy dialogue and abrupt, explosive violence. In 1930 he published The Maltese Falcon, the novel that sharpened the genre to a lethal point, unveiling Sam Spade - a private eye with a moral code all his own and a talent for keeping his face as unreadable as a blank ledger. In a San Francisco where every kindness is a setup and every partnership is a temporary convenience, he's hired to track down a missing woman, a search that spirals into a deadly hunt for a legendary falcon statuette, drawing Spade into the orbit of a trio of schemers whose charm is as dangerous as their desperation, each willing to lie, bleed, or kill for a chance to touch its promise. As the bodies stack up, the prize proves as treacherous as the people chasing it, and Spade must navigate a maze of deceit where survival means nothing if it costs him the one thing worse than death - being played for a fool.