Fifteen top stories about greed

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Kathryn Williams came up with a reading list on greed. One book she tagged:

The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett

Just about everyone around Detective Sam Spade dies trying to get their hands on a bird figurine worth…$10,000. Hopefully something is lost in inflation.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Maltese Falcon appears on Sara Brady's top five list of books with plots propelled by the search for an object, J. Kingston Pierce's top ten list of introductions to crime fiction and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best fat men in literature and ten of the best femmes fatales in literature, and among Armistead Maupin's five best San Francisco novels and Janet Rudolph's ten favorite San Francisco-backdropped crime novels.

--Marshal Zeringue