Is it possible in this day of enlightened justice for a man to be punished twice for the same crime? Double Jeopardy answers this question, at the same time uncovering the greatest of many loopholes in our modern jurisprudence. In this very human but striking novel are portrayed the calamities that can be visited upon any ordinary citizen by the cold dispassionate judgement of our courts and our unimaginative and often stupid juries. Through the eyes of the victim, Peter Thatcher, this tense revelation unfolds, growing to ugly and utterly ridiculous proportions. "Peter Thatcher has murdered...

THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED ... 1938. Alexander Roth is hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles, where he hopes to reconnect with his self-absorbed, cutesy-poo girlfriend. A car stops to pick him up and he is soon plunged into a long nightmare from which there may be no escape. This fatalistic novel is a forgotten noir masterpiece that has languished for decades in the swamps of neglected crime fiction. In 1945, film director Edgar G Ulmer cranked out the movie version in a couple of weeks on a microscopic budget, and it is now widely recognized as one of the greatest gems in film noir...