Showing results by author "Ed McBain" in All Categories

A bitterly cold night offers up a body turned blue - not frozen, but swinging from a rope in a dank basement. The dead teen seems like a clear case of suicide, but Detective Steve Carella and Lieutenant Peter Byrnes find a few facts out of place, and an autopsy confirms their suspicions. The boy hadn’t hung himself but OD’d on heroin before an unknown companion strung him up to hide the true cause of death.

Selected Shorts is an award-winning, one-hour program featuring readings of classic and new short fiction, recorded live at New York's Symphony Space. One of the most popular series on the airwaves, this unique show is hosted by Isaiah Sheffer and produced for radio by Symphony Space and WNYC Radio.

When a young woman’s body is fished out of the 87th Precinct’s river, a street-wise detective is on the clock to find the con man who killed her before he strikes again.

Detective Steve Carella’s sister is getting married but someone wants the groom dead, and Steve has just a few hours to locate the killer before his sister becomes a bride — and a widow — on the same day.

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.

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.

>"I will kill the Lady tonight at 8. What can you do about it?" This is the message on a pasted-up letter handed to Desk Sergeant Dave Murchison at 8:00 a.m. The detectives at the 87th Precinct have gotten these types of threats before, but there’s something different about this one. Something ominous. Problem is, the city contains millions of women—finding the right one in 12 hours is like finding a needle in a haystack.

It should have been the night that launched a new pop idol. Tamar Valparaiso is young and beautiful, with the body and voice of an angel. The stage is set for her to launch her debut album, Bandersnatch, on a luxury yacht in the heart of the city. But halfway through her performance, masked men drag Tamar off the stage and into a waiting speedboat, while the partygoers look on helplessly.

A woman is murdered in a liquor store, hurtling the men from the 87th Precinct into an investigation of her secret lives and many possible enemies. Faced with a host of suspects—from the woman’s former mother-in-law to her ex-husband, employer, and a string of boyfriends—the detectives find themselves with a victim whose identity spurns all conventional definition.

A beat cop winds up on the trail of a deadly mugger, but when it suddenly gets personal, his own life might be the next thing to be snatched….

The book behind the major motion picture High and Low, King's Ransom is the tenth book in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series. Here, McBain delivers the full-throttle action and suspense we have come to expect. When a wealthy businessman is faced with a kidnapping, the ransom could ruin his biggest deal ever—unless Detective Steve Carella can find the culprits before the kidnapping turns to murder.

The only person Detective Bert Kling cares about in this world is his fiancée, Claire Townsend. And when her body is found slain at the infamous “bookstore massacre,” Bert and every detective in the precinct is determined to get the man responsible. To do so, they’re going to have to figure out the connection between a junkie, a professor, a bookstore owner, and the beautiful fiancée of a cop. When they do, there will be nowhere for the killer to hide. This is a devastating look at the personal side of a hardened detective.

When a sniper begins gunning down cops from the 87th Precinct in cold blood, it’s up to Detective Steve Carella to solve the case. With three cops already dead, Carella delves into the city’s underworld to search for the killer.

Everyone in the 87th Precinct gets in on the act in Tricks. This audiobook from Ed McBain is a multicrime Halloween story full of murder, mayhem, and cops walking the line between decent society and the evil just beneath its surface.

Her former lovers are dying one by one, and beautiful Marilyn Hollis is a top suspect. Smitten Detective Willis tries to believe in her innocence, until he begins to have his doubts.

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.

It’s like an old-time gangster movie: A speeding car, a blazing gun…and suddenly a guy walking down the street without a care in the world is lying in the gutter without a head on his shoulders. But who pulled the high-powered trigger that turned Sy Kramer from a blackmailer into a chalk outline? Was it the politician’s wife with a pornographic past? The soda-pop tycoon desperate to keep a business-busting bungle bottled up? Or was it whoever was paying Kramer a small fortune to hide what must’ve been one very big bad?

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.

Her name is Virginia Dodge. And she’s here to kill Detective Steve Carella. An ordinary day at the 87th Precinct is about to take a turn for the worse when Dodge shows up to put a bullet in Carella’s head. And she doesn’t care if she has to take all the men in the 87th with her to do it. Armed with a homemade bomb, a handgun, and a bottle of nitroglycerine hidden in her purse, Virginia holds the entire squad room hostage as she waits for Carella. And no one is leaving until he shows up to meet his maker.

One brother lies dead while another brother sits in jail, accused of the murder. Only attorney Matthew Hope believes in his innocence - and he’ll have to rely on faith over facts to prove it.