Ed McBain

A police detective hunts for a pattern in a puzzling murder spree in this mystery by “a master” (Time).
 
A blind violinist taking a smoke break. A cosmetics sales rep cooking an omelet in her own kitchen. A college professor trudging home from class. A priest contemplating retirement in the rectory garden. An old woman walking her dog. These are the seemingly random targets, all shot twice in the face. But...

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. The 87th Precinct gets a visit from one of the city's most accomplished criminals -- a thief known as the Deaf Man. Because he might be deaf. Or he might not. So little is known about the man who is harassing...

But before he turned to novels, McBain wrote short crime fiction under various names, for pulp magazines including Manhunt and Argosy. Collected in this anthology are twenty-five of these early stories, organized under headings such as "Women in Jeopardy," "Private Eyes," "Loose Cannons," and "Gangs." For fans of Ed McBain, the author's introduction to this anthology will be just as exciting as the stories themselves. There and in his introductory...

Ed McBain, author of the best-selling 87th Precinct series, takes us Downtown in this harrowing tale of a lone out-of-towner running for his life in New York CIty. Meet Michael Barnes, a Florida orange grower who finds himself in a Wall Street bar with a couple of hours to kill. It's a couple of hours that almost kill him, as he's swindled, robbed, framed for murder, and hunted down by an assassin in one of the wildest, scariest, funniest, fastest...

An 87th Precinct novel -- Certain that someone is trying to kill her, Emma Bowles turns to another killer for protection, and only a dedicated cop trapped in a defective legal system can save her.

From the internationally admired creator of the 87TH Precinct series come these tales featuring policemen and their work and displaying Ed McBain's inimitable talents in shorter form. . . . In this collection of short stories, bestselling author Ed McBain presents a varied and colorful cast of characters who run afoul of, then into, the arms of the law. . . . A collector who loves his porcelain more than his daughter; a hooker who melts the heart...

A long shadow looms above the wife of filmmaker Carlton Markham. Then a hand clamps over her mouth, and a blade sinks into her back. Blood splatters on the film reel case beside her, and a young life is cut short. Lawyer Matthew Hope gets a call from Markham, who's been arrested for his wife's murder, but he says he didn't do it. Witnesses fly forward to proclaim his guilt, but Markham's not giving up on his innocence that easily. And when Hope digs...

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 and took it out on the man with the butt end of a .45. 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...

A sleeper agent travels cross-country to assassinate the president in this terrifying political thriller from the bestselling author of the 87th Precinct series. Sonny Hemkar is a doctor in a rough part of Los Angeles, a resident whose days and nights are an endless parade of bullet wounds, cracked skulls, knife-wielding addicts, and innocent victims who don't understand what's happening to their neighborhood. Sonny is just as frightened as they...

A visiting nurse is found murdered aboard a US Navy destroyer in this gripping mystery from the bestselling author of the 87th Precinct series. When Claire Cole meets a sailor at the hospital, he's just another enlisted man in need of her care . . . until he mistakes a nurse's compassion for true love, and a few dates as the beginning of a grand romance. But then Claire visits the USS Sykes to tell him that it's over, and something in him snaps....