Squealer [aka The Squeaker]

Someone is selling out London's underworld to the police. Not a detective, not a reformer. The Squealer moves through the city's criminal networks like a ghost, feeding information that turns killers into targets and leaves bodies piling up in alleyways. The crooks don't know who to fear more: the law, or the anonymous informant selling them out. When the Squealer's attention turns to Chief Inspector Barrabal of Scotland Yard, the game shifts entirely. Now someone is trying to put a bullet in the detective who stands between London's bleeding underbelly and the chaos that would follow if the Squealer's true identity ever surfaced. Edgar Wallace crafted Squealer in an era when he commanded an almost unprecedented grip on English popular imagination - a quarter of all books read in England bore his name. This is vintage Wallace: plots that twist like corkscrews, dialogue that snaps and cracks, and a premise that pulls you in by the throat and doesn't let go. The mystery isn't just whodunit, but why anyone would systematically dismantle an entire criminal class, and what happens when the hunter becomes the hunted. For readers who cut their teeth on golden age thrillers, or anyone who wants to understand why Hitchcock and generations of filmmakers kept adapting Wallace's work, this is crime fiction at its purest: fast, brutal, and impossible to put down.