Showing results by author "Ed McBain" in All Categories

With his private-detective friend murdered and two Cubans leaving a bloody trail in their search for a mysterious woman, Matthew Hope must decipher the clues to save her - and put his friend’s memory to rest.

A man armed with a shotgun is loose in the city, killing married couples. It’s up to Detectives Carella and Kling to find him before he ends the next marriage.

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.

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.

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.

During a sweltering heat wave, Detectives Carella and Kling try to make sense of an artist who turned off his air conditioning to commit suicide - but Kling has an even deadlier problem on his hands.

Two perps - one a serial killer and the other a rapist who revisits his victims - test the limits of the 87th Precinct’s detectives as they race to catch these maniacs loose on the city’s streets.

A killer is out for blood, and it’s up to Detective Steve Carella to bring him in. But a shocking surprise awaits when a survivor fingers the suspect in a lineup.

When a talented young filmmaker is brutally murdered, all evidence points to her loner husband. But lawyer Matthew Hope sees a different story - one with no happy ending for an innocent man.

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.

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?

These three nerve-racking stories from best-selling author Ed McBain put detectives from the 87th Precinct on the trail of different killers who take the lives of a rich woman, a rabbi, and a ski instructor.

Ed McBain concocts a brilliant and intricate thriller about a master criminal who haunts the city with cryptic passages from Shakespeare, directing the detectives of the 87th Precinct to a future crime, if only they can figure out what he means.

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.

Between a highly successful cat burglar and a hippie crucifixion, the 87th Precinct definitely doesn't need the Deaf Man showing up again - especially since his two previous appearances resulted in blackmail, murder, and general havoc. But at least they have him now...unless he had them first.

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.

Six naked, murdered bodies on a cold January night put Detectives Carella and Kling in the middle of a full-on gang war and in a head-to-head battle with a mysterious criminal mastermind.

When a client is murdered just before he’s due to pay forty grand for a bean farm, lawyer Matthew Hope wanders into a world of shotguns, cowboys, dangerous farm beauties, and vanished cash.

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?

A comedian dies on national television in front of 40 million viewers, and the detectives of the 87th Precinct must solve the puzzle of how he made someone mad enough to murder.