It was a game of cat and mouse right from the start. Mallory Queen, a former State Department man who’d gone freelance, had a plan. He wanted to trade Willis Browning, a CIA-held double-agent, to the Russians in return for a spy named Vordak, who possessed a vast amount of information relating to Russia’s space program.

The CIA would never willingly release its prisoner, of course, but because Vordak was the bigger prize, Queen decided to snatch Browning away from them. So he enlisted private eye Larry Kent - a former CIA man himself - to mastermind the kidnap...even if it meant that Larry had to sell out some of his closest friends to do it.

About Larry Kent:

Larry Kent started his life as the hero of a half-hour radio show on Australia’s Macquarie Network, and was inspired chiefly by the success of the hardboiled mysteries of Carter Brown. As the popularity of the radio show grew, the Cleveland Publishing Pty. Ltd decided to publish a series of Larry Kent novels. Two authors, Don Haring (an American who lived in Australia) and Des R Dunn (a Queenslander) are primarily associated with the series. Between 1954 and 1983, Larry appeared in well over 400 adventures.

Kent is a typical hardboiled private eye. He smokes Camels, drinks whisky, and within the first dozen pages or so, has usually met a dame and is fighting for his life. His mean streets are pure New York (although the radio series was set in Australia) and include Harlem nightclubs and Jersey roadhouses.

Generally the body counts are high: About six deaths per novel.

But there’s another side to Larry Kent. He’s a Vietnam war veteran, he used to work for the CIA and still does, usually reluctantly, on occasion. And once, when an attempt was made on his life, the Agency paid for him to have plastic surgery that altered his appearance...something he never quite managed to get used to.

Larry Kent is fast and fun, and Piccadilly Publishing is proud to be bringing his cases to a whole new generation of fans.