The Maltese Falcon

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. In Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled San Francisco, Sam Spade is a detective who can read a room as quickly as a threat. When the mysterious Miss Wonderly asks him to find her runaway sister and the man she fled with, Floyd Thursby, the case seems simple—until Spade and his partner Miles Archer begin tailing Thursby and the story slips into suspicion, desire, and danger. By nightfall, Archer is dead in a muddy alley, and Spade is left to face the police, the questions, and the growing sense that everyone is lying. As Lieutenant Dundy and Tom Polhaus probe him, Spade stays cool and defiant, refusing to surrender information or submit to authority. The investigation soon leads him into the smoky, seductive orbit of Casper Gutman, a charming but menacing power broker obsessed with the priceless black bird at the center of the mystery. Spade's encounters with Gutman, and his later consultations with his lawyer Sid Wise, deepen the novel's web of greed, betrayal, and hidden motives.