Man, this book is old; Kling is still a new detective and married to the model who might have started cheating on him, The City is a pre-Giuliani cesspool, and the copyright date says 1981. Well, that’s about all you can say about it to know how old the book is. Its contents and story have aged well, but it’s worth remembering that this series is only middle aged here at about 30 years old.
The main plot: on the hottest week of the year, the boys from the 87th find an apparent suicide in a apartment where the air conditioner has been shut off. This causes them to delve a little deeper, and they discover that several things in the apartment have been wiped of prints–including the thermometer and the bottle of pills the victim used in the suicide. So suicide it probably ain’t. In side plots, a recent ex-con decides Kling deserves to die for sending him up and Kling’s investigation of the alleged infidelity of his wife.
The book’s only 180 pages long, so it reads like a script for a television series in spots, but really, isn’t that what we expect of these middle-of-the-series books?
