Richard Condon Books In Order

Prizzi’s Honor

Prizzi’s Honor is no ordinary story of boy meets girl. Charley Partanna is a faithful lieutenant for the Prizzis, New York’s most powerful Mafia family. The object of his affections is Irene Walker, a Los Angeles based tax consultant. But it’s her freelancing that pays she’s a hit woman for the Mob. She has also cheated the Prizzis out of an unforgivably large sum of money. This is very dangerous moonlighting indeed, and eventually it places Charley’s oldest loyalties in conflict with his newest one. Which wins? ‘His best book since THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE…
he mixes caricature and character as easily as Charley hacks off thumbs.’ Chicago Tribune Book World

Prizzi’s Family

By day Charley Partanna is a hit man for the Prizzi family. By night he studies for his high school equivalency exam when he’s not juggling two gorgeous women. But these two may be more than even Charley can handle. One, Mardell, is a knockout, one third fantasy and two thirds legs. The other, Maerose, is Charley’s boss’s granddaughter. She’s hungry for power, honor…
and Charley…
usually in that order. And she doesn’t want to share. For Charley, it’s a problem that he needs to solve but his hormones keep getting in the way. ‘Cheerful and funny…
foaming with perversity, rascality, obsessional religious mania, assault and battery and our old friends greed and lust.’ Time

Prizzi’s Glory

Tired, depressed and bored, Charley Fontana marries Maerose ‘for the change.’ But he needn’t have bothered. Don Corrado has a bigger change in mind…
respectability for the Prizzis. Gambling, narcotics, extortion, murder, loan sharking, prostitution these lines get franchised to young muscle. But the money still flows to the family. Don Corrado uses it to leverage a new scam: national political power, with Charley now the respectable Charles Macy Barton at the helm. ‘Another feast of cheerful mordancy. Prizzi’s Glory is further proof that there is no more accomplished or entertaining satirist writing today.’ The New Yorker

Prizzi’s Money

Organizing a daring plot to raise herself out of poverty, Julia Ashbury flees with more than a billion dollars in Prizzi funds, and hit man and womanizer Charley Partanna is ordered to track her down. PW. NYT.

The Manchurian Candidate

As compelling and disturbing as when it was first published in the midst of the Cold War, The Manchurian Candidate continues to enthrall readers with its electrifying action and shocking climax…
.

Sgt. Raymond Shaw is a hero of the first order. He’s an ex prisoner of war who saved the life of his entire outfit, a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the stepson of an influential senator…
and the perfect assassin. Brainwashed during his time as a P.O.W., he is a ‘sleeper’ a living weapon to be triggered by a secret signal. He will act without question, no matter what order he is made to carry out. To stop Shaw and those who now control him, his former commanding officer, Bennett Marco, must uncover the truth behind a twisted conspiracy of torture, betrayal, and power that will lead him to the highest levels of the government and into the darkest recesses of his own mind…
.

An Infinity of Mirrors

Against the backdrop of the Na*zi nightmare, Richard Condon has spun a powerfully moving tale of love and terror. ‘It is,’ says the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘a superb soul searching Condon novel…
Condon is not merely a great storyteller with a wildly roaring love of loving, he is a great moral voice whose every book can be read and reread because the questions he raises are basic.’

Winter Kills

In Winter Kills, Richard Condon probes one of the most significant events in America’s 20th century: the assassination of a president. Timothy Kegan is shot in a Philadelphia motorcade; a presidential commission condemns a lone psychopath as the killer. Fourteen years later, Tim’s half brother, Nick, learns through a deathbed confession that Tim was the victim of a mysterious conspiracy. As Nick attempts to find the real assassin, he encounters oil kings, movie queens, venal police, organized crime, the CIA, and labor unions all eager for power and control. The ending is guaranteed to surprise and horrify!

Emperor of America

A nuclear device wipes out Washington DC. It can only have been the Royalists, led by the family of Colonel Chay Appleton, the US Army’s greatest hero. They aim to become America’s imperial dynasty, and Chay is now the obvious choice to run the country.

The Final Addiction

Owney Hazman is the American dream. He’s a money making hot dog salesman with a beutiful wife and rich father in law. But Owney has a prblem: his mother left when he was nine and he’s still trying to find her. And when Owney meets scheming Oona Noon, he soon realizes his problems are just beginning. Engineer of her dim husband’s bid fir the presidency, which she fuels with profits from her multi billion dollar cocaine importing operation, Oona has plans for Owney. With the dazzle of his mythically perfect smile, he’ll make the ideal point man for one of her shadier international deals. Now, dogged by powerful enemies from the mandarins of Peking to the crime barons of the Prizzi’s and with no sign of his mother, Owney is hardly ready for Oona’s next proposal: that he, too, belongs in politics! The Final Addiction is a triumph of contemporary Americana from Richard Condon, the unchallenged master of high comic suspense.

The Venerable Bead

As the story begins…
It is the early 1970s, when every American man, woman, and child is fighting the threat of Communist invasion. Leila Aluja, an Iraqi American lawyer, becomes a film star as part of her job with the government’s top counter espionage unit, in an effort to track down a ring of Sino Albanian spies operating out of Hollywood’s most powerful talent agency. Leila accomplishes her mission, but not before she falls in love with Albanian spymaster Josef Shqitonja, and compromises her organization by allowing him to escape, bringing an end to her budding undercover career. Leila bounces back to become a partner of Washington’s largest lobbying firm, representing the National Gun Carriers Association, C.A.N.C.E.R. Center for American National Cigarette Education and Research, and Barkers Hill Enterprises, investment arm of organized crime. From her law practice, Leila moves onto public relations, and then to the head of the world’s largest fast food conglomerate, all the while separated from her true love, Shqitonja, as he scours Albania for a secret, life prolonging yogurt formula. Despite the occasional, not to say habitual, affairs, daliances, and marriages, Leila and Shqitonja cling to their love for each other until the secret of the yogurt finally reunites them. More than just a love story, The Venerable Bead is a saga of love for self, money, unassailable corruption, and power. All just kidding, of course.

The Crown Crime Companion

The Crown Crime CompanionThe Top 100 Mystery Novels Of All TimeSelected by theMystery Writers Of AmericaAnnotated by 0tto Penzler and Compiled by Mickey FriedmanFor The Crown Crime Companion, the Mystery Writers of America have compiled a list of the best 100 mystery novels of all time, as well as a list of favorites in ten categories. Fully annotated and reviewed by Otto Penzler, this list of the top 100 mysteries will be a valuable resource to fans, introducing them to new novels and reminding them about books by favorite writers they may have missed. Each of the ten category lists is introduced by a master of that category:Classics:Suspense:Hardboiled/Private Eye:Police Procedural:Espionage/Thriller:Criminal:Cozy/Traditional:Historical:Humorous:Legal/Courtroom:H.R.F. KeatingMary Higgins ClarkSue GraftonJoseph WambaughJohn GardnerRichard CondonMargaret MaronPeter LoveseyGregory McdonaldScott Turow