Everybody Dies

Matthew Scudder is finally leading a comfortable life. He's sober, he's married, and the state just gave him a private investigator's license. He's growing older, and he's even getting respectable.

And his town is mellowing, too. The crime rate's down and the stock market's up. Gentrification's prettying up the old neighborhood. The New York streets don't seem so mean anymore.

Then Scudder signs on to help his closest and most unlikely friend, the larger-than-life Hell's Kitchen hoodlum Mick Ballou. And all hell breaks loose.

Scudder finds out he's not so respectable after all. He learns the spruced-up sidewalks of New York are as mean as they ever were, dark and gritty and stained with blood. And he discovers he's living in a world where the past is a minefield, the present is a war zone, and the future's an open question. It's a world where nothing's certain and nobody's safe, a random universe where no man's survival can be taken for granted -- not even his own.

Matt Scudder's most desperate and suspenseful case is Lawrence Block's richest, strongest, finest novel.