Murder, My Love – Mickey Spillane, Max Allan Collins Free Audiobook

Written by Mickey Spillane, Max Allan Collins
Read by Stefan Rudnicki
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Murder, My Love
Mike Hammer Series, Book 24
by Mickey Spillane
Max Allan Collins
Stefan Rudnicki – Narrator

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: March 19, 2019
Duration: 05:08:45

Mike Hammer is summoned to a meeting with Jamie Winters, a United States senator from New York, and Jamie’s lovely, very smart wife, Nicole, considered by many to be the power behind the throne.

Winters is being blackmailed, and Hammer is given a list of suspects who may be behind the threats to the senator’s career. But when the suspects begin to drop like flies, Hammer realizes there is more to this case than just a salacious tape.

From Goodreads—“Spillane published the original 13 in his lifetime between 1947 (I, The Jury) and 1996 (Black Alley). Since Spillane’s passing, his friend Max Allan Collins has taken Spillane’s partial manuscripts, notes, and outlines and finished another 12 novels beginning with The Goliath Bone (2008) and going to next year’s upcoming Masquerade for Murder (2020), a total of 25.

As Collins concedes, Murder, My Love is based on an outline not a manuscript and is more Collins than Spillane at this point, but the spirit of Spillane is so thoroughly invoked that it is hard to tell the difference.

In any event, it is a terrific story, one that has an aging Mike Hammer (now hovering around 60) stepping once more into the fray. Hammer jokes about his aging reflexes and that he’s old, but not dead when one lady or another puts her moves on him.

The case here is blackmail, a point which politics, sex, and violence often merge. And, Hammer, still engaged to aging knockout Velda after several decades, flatfoots it around town trying to nail the blackmailers. Unfortunately, Velda plays a background role here and isn’t as prominently featured.

By the end of the story, the body count rises to Hammer standards although he and his .45 can’t claim responsibility for most of the corpses. In today’s age, this novel doesn’t stand out for its sex and violence, but the early Hammer novels did.

This is a fast-paced tale that will be appreciated by Spillane fans and hardboiled fiction readers