Such Men Are Dangerous

"This goes through you like a dose of salts and stings like iodine."So said Virginia Kirkus Reviews of Such Men Are Dangerous when it first appeared almost fifty years ago, and since then this edge-of-the-chair novel hasn't lost a step. It's the story of Paul Kavanagh, a burnt-out ex-Green Beret who copes with what we've since learned to call PTSD by retiring to a dime-sized islet in the Florida Keys. There he lives a determinedly simple life, his human contact limited to a weekly visit to a storekeeper on a nearby island. Then George Dattner turns up with a plan. A CIA op, he has inside knowledge of a scheduled shipment of military goods from an army base in South Dakota. It's really nasty stuff-atomic grenades, lethal gas, tactical weaponry that could be a game-changer for a border war or insurgency. And he's got a buyer lined up. All he needs is a partner, because the way he's got it figured, hijacking the shipment is a job that the right two men can pull off. Kavanagh signs on. The operation is brilliantly planned and executed, but not without a few surprises along the way. But the greatest surprise, and a denouement that's as shocking now as it was half a century ago, will hit you as hard as it hit readers half a century ago. THE CLASSIC CRIME LIBRARY brings together Lawrence Block's early crime novels, reformatted and with new uniform cover art.