When crime novelist Mickey Spillane died in 2006, he left behind five unfinished novels featuring his hardest of hard-boiled private eyes, Mike Hammer. He stipulated that they should go to his friend, fellow writer, and occasional collaborator Max Allan Collins. Collins is now completing and publishing those books in Spillane’s memory. The first came out this fall: The Goliath Bone (Harcourt, $23), which is, chronologically speaking, the last Hammer, bringing the aging New York City gumshoe’s career to a fitting (and fittingly violent) close. While Hammer stories are often timeless, this one is tied firmly to the post-September 11 world. It builds around the discovery, in Israel’s Valley of Elah, of an oversized thigh bone said to be have once belonged to Goliath, the legendary Philistine giant felled by a slingshot-wielding David. The two young people who found this artifact are now threatened in Manhattan by both al-Qaeda terrorists and Israeli extremists, so they turn to Hammer for protection. In short order, Hammer and his secretary turned fiancée, Velda Sterling, are mixing it up with international assassins, federal agents, archaeologists, Broadway showmen, and at least one retired cop who’s having a hard time staying out of trouble. The Goliath Bone doesn’t send Hammer in a new direction, or cause one to rethink Spillane’s series as a whole. It’s a solid capper to Hammer’s professional arc, though, and a valuable reminder of this series’ strengths — fast action, a fully realized protagonist, and mayhem not inconsistent with Hammer’s urban jungle milieu and the dangers of his assignments. — Jeff Pierce