Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge (UK 2000)

From the Publisher:
A powerful Matt Scudder novel about love and loss.
Matthew Scudder is hired to find Paula Hoeldtke. Hot on the ice-cold trail of the missing girl, he finds it's a sleaze-and-terror playground in which he is looking for love in all the wrong places, and finding death in all the right ones.

Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge. A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel. Orion Books, ISBN: 0752837494 (December, 2000), 244 p., £5.99.

Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge (USA 1996)

From the Publisher:
Matthew Scudder understands the futility of his search for a longtime missing Midwestern innocent who wanted to be an actress in the vast meat-grinder called New York City. But her frantic father heard that Schudder is the best - and now the ex-cop-turned-p.i. is scouring the hell called Hell's Kitchen looking for anything that might resemble a lead. And in this neighborhood of the lost, he's finding love - and death - in the worst possible places.

Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge. A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel. Avon Books, ISBN: 0380709937 (March, 1996), 352 p., $6.99.

Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge (USA 1990)

From the Publisher:
It isn't called Hell's Kitchen for nothing - a gritty landscape of dark doorways and dirty alleys inhabited by crack addicts and homeless. A sleaze-and-terror playground lorded over by Mickey Ballou, the bloodstained Butcher Boy. Ex-cop, ex-boozer, ex-innocent Matthew Scudder is trying to stay sober in this city gone mad. And, hot on the ice-cold trail of a missing ingenue, he's looking for love in all the wrong places... and finding death in all the right ones.

Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge. Avon Books, ISBN: 0380709937 (October, 1990), 340 p., $4.95.

Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge (USA 1989)

From the Publisher:
Hell's Kitchen...
"And we're down in this cellar and Mick's got this guy lashed to a beam, and he's wailing at him with a ball bat and blood's flying everywhere. Next time I see him he's wearing the apron and it's stained. 'See this?' he says. 'It's rat blood.' "

He's Mick Ballou, the Butcher Boy, and his bloodstained apron passes for formal dress in Hells Kitchen. That makes him just part of the scenery for Matt Scudder, hard-drinking hero of Eight Million Ways to Die. Scudder's off the booze now, trying to stay sober, in a city gone mad. In the sacred gin-mills and dim church basements of Hell's kitchen, in the alleys and doorways and subway tunnels where addicts suck on crack pipes and homeless families pitch camp, he haunts the cold trail of a lost ingenue and finds love and death in all the wrong places. His relentles hunt pays off in a jolting climax that will rattle your teeth, shake you to the soles of you shoes and take you all the way Out on the Cutting Edge.

Lawrence Block's crime novels have won him a wide readership and many awards, including the Edgar, the Nero and the Shamus. Films based on his books include Burglar (starring Whoopi Goldberg) and Eight Million Ways to Die (with Jeff Bridges as Matthew Scudder). He is a member of the International Narcotics Enforcement Officers Association and the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime. Like Scudder, he has spent most of his life in New York, chiefly in the Sixth Precinct and Midtown North.

Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge. William Morrow, ISBN: 0688090699 (October, 1989), 260 p., $17.95.