The Death Messenger

Jigger Masters-hard-nosed, unflappable, and blessed with a nose for the devil's smallest tracks-returns in The Death Messenger: The Complete Cases of Jigger Masters, Volume 4. Two savage, old-time pulp mysteries test his wits against theatrical murder, chemical horrors, and crimes that seem to answer to no earthly law.

In "The Death Messenger," a Long Island estate of eccentric experimenters becomes the stage for a sequence of deaths so ingenious and bizarre that even seasoned troopers call it witchcraft: invisible knives that fly from the dark, an explosion that erases a man from existence, a vapor that eats leather and flesh, and finally, something buried inside a gleaming plaster model that refuses to stay hidden. Masters must cut through crate-loads of deception-false identities, whispered societies, and vivid misdirection-to find a killer whose art is disappearance itself.

In "A Giant in the Swimming Pool," the Tegarth brothers' basement laboratory holds a scientific secret worth killing for: massive centrifuges, sealed tanks of "heavy" water, and a private swimming pool wired into the plant. When an elevator is sabotaged, an explosion rocks the lab and a man is found at the bottom of an emptied tank, the scene engineered to look like an impossible accident. Masters peels back staged scenes, slow-acting chemistry and hidden plumbing to expose how someone weaponized invention and timing to turn technology into a murder method-and why a lowly night watchman might risk everything to grab the prize.

Lean, atmospheric, and crackling with period detail, The Death Messenger collects two of Rud's best Jigger Masters cases-detective fiction with the pulpy heart of early-20th-century menace.