Book excerpt: Only recently out of the Army and back in the USA after fighting the Japanese in the Far East, Hank Janson is in no mood to just sit back and take it when his old friend Lola gets caught in the crossfire of a bar-room shooting. He sets out to avenge her death, finding himself up against a vicious gangster - and three even more dangerous women ... With their erotic pin-up covers and hardboiled crime tales, the Hank Janson pulp paperbacks were a British publishing sensation in the 1940s and 1950s, selling millions of copies to readers craving escapism from post-war austerity. Prosecutions under Britain's then-harsh obscenity laws dealt them a severe blow, however, and today they are highly sought after by collectors. The tough, uncompromising This Woman is Death was the very first novel in the regular Hank Janson series, originally published in 1948. It is reissued by Telos Publishing complete with its original Reginald Heade cover.