A collection of suspense stories, puzzle stories, whodunits and tricky whydunits involving police detectives, private eyes, talented and sometimes lucky amateurs, armchair detectives, and ethnic detectives

He’s fat. He’s old. He’s conceited. He’s rumpled. He inhabits a violent world — the CIA — yet he is non-violent. He loves two things, and only two, in all the world: eating and practicing his trade. He is an international troubleshooter, and he’s the best there is. He is Charlie Dark. The gang from Hopscotch is back, with Charlie Dark replacing Miles Kendig as the loner, the misfit who doesn’t fit the buttoned-down image of the Agency. His superior, Myerson, is here, and he hates Charlie as much as he hated Kendig. Cutter and Ross return, and so does Yaskov, the Soviet super-spy. Checkpoint Charlie is Brian Garfield’s brilliant sequel to Hopscotch, the novel which won an Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1976 and was filmed with Walter Matthau in 1980

No suspense collection is complete without this anthology. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the stories in this volume represent many of the biggest names in detective and suspense fiction: Ellery Queen, Harold Q. Masur, Celia Fremlin, Jack Ritchie, Patricia Highsmith and Bill Pronzini are only a few of the prize-winning authors in this amazing volume