A con man tries to blackmail a Mexican gangster.
When a kindly priest is murdered while waiting at a street corner in a quiet Connecticut town, the citizens are horrified and demand action from the police. All of the witnesses identify John Waldron, a nervous out-of-towner, as the killer. District Attorney Henry Harvey is then put on the case and faces political opposition in his attempt to prove Waldron's innocence.
Claude is a ruthless and efficient contract killer. His next target, a woman, is the most difficult.
Frank Bigelow is about to die, and he knows it. The accountant has been poisoned and has only 24 hours before the lethal concoction kills him. Determined to find out who his murderer is, Frank, with the help of his assistant and girlfriend, Paula, begins to trace back over his last steps. As he frantically tries to unravel the mystery behind his own impending demise, his sleuthing leads him to a group of crooked businessmen and another murder.
An investigator from the War Crimes Commission travels to Connecticut to find an infamous Nazi, who may be hiding out in a small town in the guise of a distinguished professor engaged to the Supreme Court Justice’s daughter.
A Texas Ranger and a ruthless narcotics kingpin - they were childhood friends, now they are adversaries...
A falsely convicted man's wife, Catherine, and an alcoholic composer and pianist, Martin team up in an attempt to clear her husband of the murder of a blonde singer, who is Martin's wife.
A drug kingpin's rise and tragic fall is witnessed vicariously by a reporter who uses the criminal's diary as the basis for his new book.
A newspaper publisher, wanting to prove a point about the insufficiency of circumstantial evidence, talks his possible son-in-law Tom into a hoax in an attempt to expose ineptitude of the city's hard-line district attorney. The plan is to have Tom plant clues leading to his arrest for killing a female nightclub dancer. Once Tom is found guilty, he is to reveal the setup and humiliate the DA.
Stroud, a crime magazine's crusading editor has to post-pone a vacation with his wife, again, when a glamorous blonde is murdered and he is assigned by his publishing boss Janoth to find the killer. As the investigation proceeds to its conclusion, Stroud must try to disrupt his ordinarily brilliant investigative team as they increasingly build evidence (albeit wrong) that he is the killer.
Rose Loomis and her older, gloomier husband, George, are vacationing at a cabin in Niagara Falls, N.Y. The couple befriend Polly and Ray Cutler, who are honeymooning in the area. Polly begins to suspect that something is amiss between Rose and George, and her suspicions grow when she sees Rose in the arms of another man. While Ray initially thinks Polly is overreacting, things between George and Rose soon take a shockingly dark turn.
Army Lieutenant Halliday, accused of stealing the Army payroll, pursues the real thief on a frantic chase through Mexico aided by the thief's ex-girlfriend and is in turn being chased by his accuser, Capt. Blake.
George Taylor returns from WWII with amnesia. Back home in Los Angeles, he tries to track down his old identity, stumbling into a 3-year old murder case and a hunt for a missing $2 million.
Nick Garcos comes back from his tour of duty in World War II planning to settle down with his girlfriend, Polly Faber. He learns, however, that his father was recently beaten and burglarized by mob-connected trucker Mike Figlia, and Nick resolves to get even. He partners with prostitute Rica, and together they go after Mike, all the while getting pulled further into the local crime underworld.
A fatally shot female gangleader recounts her sordid life of crime to a police officer just before she dies.
Roustabout Stanton Carlisle joins a traveling carny and unsuccessfully schemes to figure out the mind-reading act of Mademoiselle Zeena and her alcoholic husband, Pete.
When a young woman's skeletal remains turn up on a Massachusetts beach, Barnstable cop Peter Moralas teams with Boston police and uses forensics, with the help of a Harvard professor, to determine the woman's identity, how she died, and who killed her.
In a moment of madness a middle-aged, married and respectable pharmacist kills a young woman who is sun-bathing by a lake. Unable to take in what he has done, he flees from the scene of the crime and behaves as if nothing has happened. Eventually her boyfriend is charged with the crime and, in a strange twist of fate, the killer finds himself serving on the jury.
After causing a commotion with his last assignment, Falk has been given a desk job, which hardly agrees with his personality, and he ends up accepting an offer from an old friend to buy into a private investigation agency. Another friend of Falk's, Sven, purchased a business in Estonia, and when local gangsters attempted to pressure him into paying protection money, Sven retained the services of Nikolaus Lehmann, a burly private eye, to throw them off his trail. However, Lehmann does his job all too well, murdering the racketeers, and then threatening Sven and his family. With no where else to turn, Sven asks Falk to help him deal with the crazed Lehmann; Falk agrees, but soon realizes he's dealing with a more dangerous man than he imagined when Lehmann kidnaps Falk's wife Jeanette, and then releases her with a time bomb locked around her neck, demanding that Falk hand over ownership of his detective agency to Lehmann.
Locked in her cell, a murderer reflects on the events that have led her to death row.