BABY, IT'S MURDER

In his 15th and reportedly final completion of Mike Hammer cases left unfinished at Spillane’s death, Collins immerses Mike in the tribulations of his 17-year-old goddaughter. Yes, really.

After a prologue taking place in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery at the funeral of Velda, Hammer’s secretary, partner, lover, and eventual wife, Mike recalls the days in the 1970s when Velda’s kid sister, Mikki Sterling, went from being a hot high school tennis prospect to losing her matches, losing interest in the sport, and letting her grades slide precipitously. Mark Traynor, Mikki’s tennis coach, can offer no explanation for the crash-up, which Hammer traces to her continued attachment to Brian Ellis, her one-armed bad-boy ex-boyfriend, even as she’s pursuing a hot romance with Garrett Andrew Williams the Second, who boasts all the advantages of wealth and family connections that Brian lacks. The discovery that Mikki, like every other member of her generation, is using drugs shocks the hard-bitten Hammer a lot more than you might expect. His plans to get her into rehab are upended when he’s kidnapped by two hoodlums and escapes to find Velda beaten into unconsciousness, Mikki vanished, and himself soon framed for murder. Working from “several opening chapters and some plot notes,” Collins rewrites a good deal of the hardest-boiled private eye’s backstory, getting as close as you could expect to showing Hammer as an avenging father figure as he tracks down Mikki and deals out wholesale punishment to her abusers and their accomplices before a return to the present provides a bittersweet ending.

Don’t worry about being overwhelmed by sentimentality: The legendary shamus still kills and maims with the best of them.