Showing results by author "Jim Thompson" in All Categories

Luane Devore's days are numbered. All her neighbors want her dead. Some, like her young husband, Ralph, and his girlfriend, Danny, want the thousands of dollars she keeps hidden under the mattress she spends her days resting on. Others want her to stop her malicious gossip - some of which could ruin lives. Told from multiple perspectives, The Kill-Off tells the story of a woman not long for this earth - but who will finally take matters into their own hands... but when?

Joe Wilmot can't stand his wife, Elizabeth. But he sure loves her movie theater. It's a modest establishment in a beat-down town - but Joe has the run of the place, and inside its walls, he's king. Without the theater, he'd be sunk. Without his leadership, the theater would close in a heartbeat. If it isn't the life Joe imagined for himself, at the very least, it's livable. Everything changes when Joe falls for the housemaid, Carol, and the two can't keep it a secret from Elizabeth.

In this novel, Thompson's first major success as a pulp fiction writer, Joe Wilmot, trying to go straight after a stretch in the pen, finds a movie house in a small crossroads that can use a helping hand and someone with half a brain for business. The theater's owner, Elizabeth, isn't the smartest operator around - or is she? Joe and the plain Jane Elizabeth decide maybe it would be better for business if they got married. Why not?

In trouble more often than not, guilty of assault, manslaughter, and honorably discharged from the military by the skin of his teeth, David "Bugs" McKenna can't seem to help doing the right thing at the wrong time - or the wrong thing, every chance he gets. But when he drifts his way into Ragtown, Texas, things seem to finally be turning around for Bugs. Still, things are likely to get ugly, fast - and odds are, it'll have something to do with the bombshell wife of Bugs' new employer....

By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old, he had been a newspaper boy, a burlesque show hawker, a plumber's helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures, a night bellboy in a luxury hotel and over a dozen other occupations. By the time he was 18, he was driving across America in a broken-down Ford without a penny to his name and his mother and his kid sister Freddie in tow, looking for just one more paycheck to keep them all alive.

Orphaned by a tragic accident at 16, Tommy Burwell's been scraping out a meager existence working dead-end jobs for years. When he and fellow nomad Four Trey Whitey get jobs working with dynamite, making way for a new pipeline across the deserted plains of Far West Texas, disaster ensues. In a matter of days, Tommy is brutally beaten and witness to an act of cold-blooded murder the law can't be bothered to investigate.

Life has a way of testing us, pushing us to our limits and sometimes beyond. There were moments in my life when I stood on the precipice of despair, staring into the abyss of uncertainty and fear. But during these darkest times, I experienced a miraculous transformation, one that would forever change the course of my existence. This is how Jesus Christ saved my life, came into my heart, and became my guiding light.

In a world ruled by a predatory lender who takes pride in a "foolproof" system, life is a series of predictable decisions made by individuals trapped in a seemingly inescapable cycle. Everything changes when a charismatic conman enters the scene, armed with a mysterious ability to unlock the hidden goodness within us all. Will the conman dismantle the lender's foolproof system or become ensnared in its intricacies?

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