I bought this book used from Half Price Books in Springfield. I got it for $2.00 from the small discount section, but when I bought five books, I got the sixth one free. This, however, was not the free book.
This book represents a quick hit from the 87th Precinct series. Unlike many of the books, it focuses on a single crime: the stabbing of a teenager on a rainy night in the city. Carella and Kling, for the most part, focus on the atypical family structure of the victim and the illicit love that percipitated the murder. McBain deftly offers the reader multiple suspects to think of as whodunit and keeps you guessing. Or maybe I am just easily led.
With so many Ed McBain books spaced throughout my reading career, I’m never sure if I’ve read a book before, but with the McBain books, it’s never dull to reread the books. However, I had read this before, and I knew it from the one thing I took away from this book when I read it twenty years ago: The commissioner’s memo about unsigned memos. If you’ve read the book, you’ll remember.
Weighing in at 175 pages, it’s a quick read or re-read, and you can’t do much better than McBain.