Showing results by author "Ed McBain" in All Categories

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.

“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.

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 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.

A calypso singer fresh off a gig walks home in a downpour, when shots tear through his head like steel rain. A hooker out on the street in the same miserable weather doesn’t know her final trick will be her last. What brings these two sad ends together… the same gun.

It is stormy in the 87th Precinct and with every hour that passes, every minute the killer stays on the loose, the trail is only going to get colder.

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.

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.

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.

After an aging rock starlet is murdered and her daughter kidnapped, Matthew Hope must find out who’s come to collect on the woman’s former good fortune.

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.

It’s Christmas time and Detective Carella gets assigned three murders - including a best-selling author of ghost stories - and is soon after ghosts, mediums, and a crazed killer.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When three immigrants are found dead in a grisly tableau, a Florida attorney defends the man who insists he’s innocent…though he’s thrilled to see the trio slaughtered.

A piece of a torn picture in the hand of a dead man puts the detectives of the 87th Precinct on the trail of $750,000 missing from a six-year-old bank heist. With relentless pace and genius plotting, this installment of the 87th Precinct series weaves an unforgettable tale of greed and murder.

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.