Hush Money

A legendary and retired police chief lies in a New York hospital bed, visited by two strangers: the first is ex-cop-turned-PI Mike Hammer, whose life was saved more than once by the old man. To the detective, the chief gives a mysterious key. The second visitor murders the chief, mere days before he would have died from natural causes. Someone is trying to tie up loose ends, and Mike Hammer is the only one with the evidence and calculation to ferret him or her out.

Lake Tahoe, 1973: Michael Satariano — who as a young man fought the Capone mob in Chicago — has reached a comfortable middle age, with a loving wife at home, a talented teenage daughter in high school, and a son earning medals in Vietnam. Now running a casino for the mob, Michael thinks he’s put his killing days behind him — after all, he’s made a respectable life for himself and his family... and plenty of money for the boys back in Chicago. So when godfather Sam Giancana orders him to hit a notoriously violent and vulnerable gangster, Michael refuses. But when the hit goes down anyway, Michael is framed for murder; to save his family, he must turn state’s witness under the fledgling Witness Protection Program.

Relocated to the supposed safety of Paradise, a tract-housing development in Arizona, Michael soon finds himself facing a wrath so cruel that even the boy raised by a hitman father is unprepared. And with his teenage daughter in tow, Michael must return to the road and a violent way of life he thought he had long left behind.

In this stunning third installment of a trilogy so gripping and masterfully written that it could only come from “[among] the finest crime writers working today” we once again have a spellbinding window into a time of heroes and villains — and, above all, a journey along a road on which a man’s greatest crimes are all a part of his lifelong struggle for redemption.

Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Brian Grazer, Steve Zaillian, and Ridley Scott team to tell the true juggernaut success story of a cult hero from the streets of 1970s Harlem in

Nobody used to notice Frank Lucas (Oscar® winner Washington), the quiet driver to one of the inner city’s leading black crime bosses. But when his boss suddenly dies, Frank exploits the opening in the power structure to build his own empire and. create his own version of the American Dream. Through ingenuity and a strict business ethic, he comes to rule the inner-city drug trade, flooding the streets with a purer product at a better price. Lucas outplays all of the leading crime syndicates and becomes not only one of the city’s mainline corrupters, but part of its circle of legit civic superstars.

Richie Roberts (Oscar® winner Crowe) is an outcast cop close enough to the streets to feel a shift of control in the drug underworld. Roberts believes someone is climbing the rungs above the known Mafia families and starts to suspect that a black power player has come from nowhere to dominate the scene. Both Lucas and Roberts share a rigorous ethical code that sets them apart from their own colleagues, making them lone figures on opposite sides of the law. The destinies of these two men will become intertwined as they approach a confrontation where only one of them can come out on top.

A novelization by Max Allan Collins

Based on the motion picture screenplay by Steven Zaillian