Showing results by author "Ed McBain" in All Categories

An anonymous sniper on a deadly rampage has the men of the 87th Precinct on their heels and the city with tattered nerves. They must somehow find their man before he takes aim again. A gritty, relentless pressure cooker of a thriller, Ten Plus One is one of best-selling author Ed McBain’s finest, the ultimate addition to the 87th Precinct series where time threatens to stand still and murder rules the day.

He dresses in black and stalks the streets of the 87th Precinct. He is a shadow, always searching for his next victim. And when he finds it, all that will be left is a severed hand. For Detectives Carella and Hawes, this new killer is an enigma. He leaves no trace of his crime—no evidence at all. Even the severed hands have had their fingertips sheared off. With nothing much to go on, the detectives work off the hunch that the black-clad killer has a grudge against the 87th.

“Kill me if you can.” Local thug Pepe Miranda’s open challenge to the police has pushed July’s heat to a boiling point. His latest crime elevated him to the top of the 87th Precinct’s most wanted list, and now his dare is earning him street cred as well. With the city’s most dangerous gangs mobilized for an epic showdown, the fate of the precinct hangs in the balance. But Lieutenant Peter Byrnes and his detectives are ready for anything. They aren’t going to let a challenge like that lie - not from Miranda.

When a blind couple is murdered, Steve Carella’s only clue is the 10-year-old dream one of the victims had. This dream will lead him to a killer whose secret is worth murder. This lastest installment in the 87th Precinct series is a labyrinthine thriller that will leave listeners breathless.

When Detective Kling’s blushing bride is nabbed from their honeymoon suite, the men of the 87th Precinct are out to help one of their own.

There’s a lot going on in the 87th Precinct this spring, and none of it is good. Jumpers on building ledges, a salesman torn apart by an explosion, and to cap it all off, they find the dead, half-naked bodies of Irene Thayer and Tommy Barlow in bed together. It has all the earmarks of a double suicide: a note, empty liquor bottles, closed windows, and the gas on the stove turned up. At least this one’s open and shut. Or is it?

A craftsman visiting the city struggles to contact the 87th Precinct with details of a former lover’s sudden death when there’s another beauty distracting him.

Shot twice. Plummeted into cardiac arrest. Pulled from the depths of a nasty coma. Attorney Matthew Hope’s had a rough few months. So when a slightly cross-eyed beauty brings him a cushy copyright infringement suit over a similarly cross-eyed teddy bear named Gladly, all signs point to an easy victory. But before Hope can sue, he gets sucked into another case. The charge: Homicide. The main suspect: His lovely, cockeyed client, Lainie Commins.

With crooks to cuff and pimps to put behind bars, detectives Carella and Meyer of the 87th Precinct simply don’t have the time or patience to deal with a prank caller - even if he has phoned murder threats to two dozen local shop owners. What they fail to realize, however, is they aren’t dealing with a heckler who’s ringing round for kicks but rather a modern-day Moriarty known only as the Deaf Man - and these phone calls are just his first move in a calculated scheme to pull off the bank robbery of the decade.

The murder of a young mistress in a penthouse apartment has Detectives Carella and Brown investigating a family with many motives…even as an unrelated murder impacts Carella personally.

In this 87th Precinct thriller, Detective Steve Carella must track down a killer who's systematically rubbing out all the city's graffiti artists, leaving each victim mischievously splashed with paint and blood. Foul play takes another form when an old nemesis, the Dead Man, taunts Carella and the 87 with riddling clues for solving a crime, or crimes, not yet committed.

Christmas is coming. But erudite attorney Gerry Fletcher got his present early: His wife’s body with a knife buried in it. Though he shamelessly cops to being happy she’s dead, his alibi is airtight and all signs point to a burglary gone bad. But even when detectives Steve Carella and Bert Kling follow the clues to a junky punk and get a full confession, Carella can’t quit thinking there’s something about the case that’s as phony as a sidewalk Santa’s beard.

When a pale beauty accuses her hideous husband of battery, then turns up dead, the lawyer she’d hired before her death is coerced into defending the accused man. Case closed…only the beast may be innocent.

A babysitter and the child she is watching are murdered on New Year’s Eve — just as a gang war over drug trafficking erupts and puts one of the detectives of the 87th Precinct in mortal danger.

At midnight, one day dies as another comes to life. For the men of the 87th Precinct, they all bleed together in a never-ending cycle of crime and punishment. But every now and then, a day stands out as more unusual than the others. This is one of those days. Carella and Hawes investigate a murder; Kling delves into a store-front church bombing; Meyer checks out a house haunted by larcenous ghosts; Willis and Genero look into a naked hippie’s four-story death fall; Delgado takes an assault case in the Puerto Rican barrio; and Kapek hunts a man and woman mugging team.

Detective Matt Cordell was happily married once, and gainfully employed, and sober. But that was before he caught his wife cheating on him with one of his operatives. Now Matt makes his home on the streets of New York and his only companions are the city's bartenders. But trouble still knows how to find him, and when Johnny Bridges shows up from the old neighborhood, begging for Matt's help, Cordell finds himself drawn into a case full of beautiful women and bloody murder.

Sarah Whittaker is a green-eyed beauty with a love for Danny Kaye and white knights. Lawyer Matthew Hope can see all this clearly, despite the fact that whenever they meet the two are under constant surveillance by the mental institution staff. You see, Sarah’s crazy… or is she? Sarah pleads with Matthew to take her case, claiming that her mother wrongfully had Sarah committed in order to seize her inheritance money.

Murder is in season as a brutal winter grips the city. The detectives of the 87th Precinct must fight the elements and turn up the heat to find a ruthless killer.

Here are kids in trouble and women in jeopardy. Here are private eyes and gangs. Here are loose cannons and innocent bystanders. Here, too, are cops and robbers. These are the stories that prepared Evan Hunter to become Ed McBain, and that prepared Ed McBain to write the beloved 87th Precinct novels. In individual introductions, McBain tells how and why he wrote these stories that were the start of his legendary career.

Finding a dead body was not unusual for an autumn night in the 87th Precinct. But this young woman's body was naked - and potentially related to the series of odd missives received at the station house. All signs point to the Deaf Man's return, this time with a plot more diabolical than even the jaded policemen could imagine. He's been sending them mysterious pictures of police equipment: nightsticks, helmets, black horses, and more. But what did they mean?