This enduring detective series immerses you in the bustling life of the fictional metropolis of Isola. Follow the lives and cases of the tough but fair detectives of the 87th precinct as they confront the darker side of human nature daily. Each installment presents a gripping case that tests their wit, courage, and perseverance in the fight against crime. Dive into a world where justice comes at a price, and every case could be their last.
Swift, silent and deadly, soneone is killing the 87th Precinct's finest . . . When Detective Reardon is found dead, motive is a big question mark. But when his partner becomes victim number two, it looks like open-and-shut grudge killings. That is until a third detective is murdered.With one meagre clue, Detective Steve Carella beginshis grim search for the killer, a search that takes him into the city's underworld to a notorious brothel, the the apartment of a beutiful and dangerous widow and, finally, to a .45 automatic aimed straight at his head . . .
A beat cop winds up on the trail of a deadly mugger, but when it suddenly gets personal, his own life might be the next thing to be snatched.... "The 87th Precinct is] one of the great literary accomplishments of the last half-century." --Pete Hamill, Newsday "McBain has the ability to make every character believable--which few writers these days can do." --Associated Press
Most suicides don't realize the headaches they cause....Two a.m. in the bitter cold of winter: the young Hispanic man's body was found in a tenement basement. The rope around his neck suggested a clear case of suicide -- until the autopsy revealed he'd overdosed on heroin. He was a pusher, and now a thousand questions pressed down on the detectives of the 87th Precinct: Who set up the phony hanging? Whose fingerprints were on the syringe found at the scene? Who was making threatening phone calls, attempting to implicate Lieutenant Byrnes' teenage son? Somebody was pushing the 87th Precinct hard, and Detective Steve Carella and Lieutenant Pete Byrnes have to push back harder -- before a frightening and deadly chain tightens its grip.
When a young woman's body is fished out of the 87th Precinct's river, a street-wise detective is on the clock to find the con man who killed her before he strikes again. McBain forces us to think twice about every character we meet? even those we thought we already knew.? ?New York Times Book Review Imagine your favorite Law & Order cast solving fresh mysteries into infinity, with no re-runs, and you have some sense of McBain's grand, ongoing accomplishment.? ?Entertainment Weekly
Someone killed Annie Boone, but was she an innocent victim or the target of a hit? As Detectives Carella and Kling of the 87th precinct pick up the pieces of her interupted life, they move relentlessly closer to some answers yet farther from others. Struggling to find the weak link, the detectives find themselves facing a cold, hard truth they'd prefer not to know.
The detectives of the 87th Precinct pursue a desperate killer when handsome and wealthy Sy Kramer, a notorious blackmailer, is found with a bullet in his head
Suspense fiction. Her name is death - and her name is Virginia Dodge. Virginia Dodge is determined to put a bullet through Steve Carella's brain, and she doesn't care if she has to kill all the boys in the 87th Precinct in the process. Armed with a gun and a bottle of nitro-glycerine she spends an afternoon terrorising Lieutenant Byrnes and his men with her clever little home-made bomb. Is there anything the boys at the 87th can do to save Carella or will this crazy woman achieve her goal ...? In one of the most dazzling novellas of the Precinct, Ed McBain exposes the dangerous loyalties that keep the boys of the 87th together, and threaten to tear them apart at the same time.
Smrt jde ženichovi v patách…
a ženich má ten den svatbu s Angelou, sestrou Steva Carelly, jenže svatební hostina Tommyho a Angely se pro Steva a jeho kolegy ze sedmaosmdesátky změní ve smrtelnou hru na schovávanou. Carella má jen několik drahocenných hodin na to, aby vypáttal vraha a zachránil Tommyho před definitivním koncem. Ale jak najít vraha, když se skrývá mezi stovkami svatebních hostí? Je jím Tommyho svědek, který má zdědit po příteli všechen jeho majetek, pokud se vrahův úmysl zdaří? Nebo snad Ben Darcy, který dosud šíleně miluje Angelu a udělal by všechno na světě, aby ji získal zpět? Nebo ten bláznivý bývalý voják, který se zapřísáhl, že se Tommymu pomstí? Carella musí dopadnout vraha co nejrychleji, nemá-li se Angela stát ve svůj svatební den vdovou…
Zdroj BBart
The police at the 87th Precinct hate kidnappers. And these kidnappers are stupid, too. They took the wrong boy - the chauffeur's son instead of the son of the rich tycoon, Douglas King. And they want a ransom of $500,000. A lot of money. But it's not too much to pay for a little boy's life, is it?
The mystery man wore black, and he was a real cut-up king. Why else was he leaving blood-red severed hands all over the city? Was he an everyday maniac with a meat cleaver, or did he have a special grudge against the 87th Precinct? Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes went along with the grudge theory, because the black-cloaked killer didn't leave any clues to go on - the grisly hands even had the fingertips sliced off. And how do you nail a murderer when you can't identity or unearth most of his victims? That's what the boys of the 87th Precinct have to do: find a killer before he carves up any more corpseless hands!
Ve vzduchu vedle jara není zdánlivě nic, co by vyžadovalo soustředěné úsilí všech detektivů 87. revíru. A tak Bert Kling vyšetřuje běžné přepadení krásné mladé ženy a Meyer Meyer řeší telefonické vydírání jednoho z místních obchodníků. Nejzávažnější případ této polomrtvé sezóny má na bedrech Steve Carella: mrtvolu bez svršků a bez peněz, zato s výmluvným jménem John Smith v nedalekém podřadném hotelu. Tak to dopadá, když levá ruka neví, co dělá pravá. Situaci bleskurychle ovládne Hluchý, obávaný a stále unikající protivník, který si pro své rejdy oblíbil právě 87. revír, neboť v jeho kriminalistech vidí rovnocenné protihráče. Ti teď ale zaváhali, a než se jim podaří pospojovat jednotlivé případy, na kterých nezávisle pracovali, a zjistit, že všechny se slévají do jediného plánu, za kterým stojí právě Hluchý, je už téměř pozdě. Mrtvý z hotelu zůstává stále anonymním Johnem Smithem, ale už se s ním spojuje i nález výbušnin a také plán na vyloupení kterési banky ve městě. Vyděrač nehrozil jen jednomu místnímu obchodníkovi smrtí, pokud nevyklidí svůj krámek. Podobně je na tom čtyřicet dalších – a poblíž obchodů všech z nich se nalézá banka. Nastává závod s časem, ve kterém má Hluchý výhodu náskoku, bezohlednosti a také znalosti slabin protivníků.
"Kill me if you can" was Pepe Miranda's challenge. Murderer, two-bit hero of the street gangs, he was holed up somewhere in the 87th Precinct, making the cops look like fools and cheered on by every neighbourhood punk. Not a challenge the detectives in the squadroom could leave alone.
A multiple murder - and for the 87th Precinct, it's just got personal An 87th Precinct Novel October on the 87th Precinct. Indian Summer. Telephones ring lazily in the police squad room. Tired cops slump at their desks, measuring their hours with cups of coffee. Then it happened. A multiple murder in a downtown bookshop. Four people are dead, and one of them is Detective Bert Kling's fiancee. The summer was over. There's no time for tears - and Kling was the first to admit it. There are clues to find, leads to follow, people to see. And Kling was going to get the sonofabitch who murdered the only person in the world he cared for. For him, it would be a long, cold winter...
She was young, wealthy - and dead. Strangled to death in a slum apartment. All they had to go on was her name and some cancelled cheques. As Steve Carella said, 'Those cheques are the diary of her life. We'll find the answer there.' But how was he to know that they would reveal something much stranger than murder? On Passover the rabbi bled to death. Someone had brutally stabbed him and painted a J on the synagogue wall. Everyone knew who the killer was - it had to be Finch, the Jew-hater. Or did it...? The snow was pure white except where Cotton Hawes stared down at the bright red pool of blood spreading away from the dead girl's body. Hawes was supposed to be on a skiing holiday, but he couldn't just stand by and watch the local cops make a mess of the case. He had to catch the ski-slope slayer before he killed again.
A young girl jumps to her death, a salesman gets blown apart, and two semi-nude bodies are found dead on a bed with all the carmarks of a love pact. Spring was really here for the 87th Precinct. Carella and Hawes thought the double suicide stank of homicide, but the couldn't get a break. Fortunately, Hawes had something going with Christine - like love...
An 87th Precinct crime novel, in which a country man comes to the city to sell his carvings to the retail stores and tries to get up his nerve to talk to someone at the 87th Precinct about an undiscovered, very old corpse.
A blonde woman, a living doll, is found slashed to death. Steve Carella wants Bert King on the case, a belligerent cop. When he goes missing, presumed dead, the officers of the 87th Precinct go all out to find the truth.
When top TV comic Stan Gifford died there were plenty of witnesses - 40 million viewers, plus the studio crew and audience. Detectives Meyer and Carella had never had it so good, but when pretty Cindy Forrest undressed for bed, there was no one to watch - except her attacker.
For almost 50 years, fans of crime fiction have followed the boys of the 87th Precinct, a fictional urban police department precinct created by the novelist Evan Hunter, writing under the pseudonym Ed McBain.
V centre pozornosti detektívneho vyšetrovania stojí tentoraz odhalenie známej postavy – nedoslýchavého vydierača, ktorý vraždí najvyššie postavené osoby v meste. Zhodou okolností sa detektívom podarí vyriešiť všetky tri kľúčové prípady.
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. “The 87th Precinct [is] one of the great literary accomplishments of the last half-century.” —Pete Hamill, Newsday “McBain forces us to think twice about every character we meet…even those we thought we already knew.” —New York Times Book Review
A murder mystery from the 87TH PRECINCT series, first published in 1972, in which a detective discovers that the odd-shaped snapshot found clutched in a dead man's hand is a piece of deadly puzzle worth a suitcase of stolen cash.
There are 186 patrolmen and a handful of detectives in the 87th Precinct, but it's never quite enough. Because between petty crimes and major felonies, between crimes of hate and crimes of passion, the city never sleeps -- and for these cops, a day never ends... The night shift has a murdered go-go dancer, a firebombed black church, a house full of ghosts, and a mother trying to get her twenty-two year-old to come home. The day shift: a naked hippie lying smashed on the concrete, two murderous armed robbers in Halloween masks, and a man beaten senseless by four guys using sawed-off broom handles. Altogether, it's a day in the life. But for a certain cop in the 87th Precinct, it could just be his last...
Je sobotná noc na 87. obvode a "zábava" sa môže začať... V priebehu 24 hodín je na ulici nožom zavraždená pôvabná blondínka, náboženský blúznivec hodí bombu do kostola v černošskom gete a detektív Andy Parker je ťažko zranený ako obeť výstrelov zamaskovaných lupičov. Vyzerá to takmer, akoby zločin už presahoval sily policajtov z 87. obvodu .....
By day the city works. By night it plays, and everyone is invited to the game: the rich the poor, the adventurous and the tame. Sometimes, the playground turns deadly. Sometimes, the homicide detectives from the 87th Precinct are invited, too... Sadie When She Died The victim had a knife plunged in her chest. The husband was glad, and didn't hide it. From the beginning, Detective Carella is sure someone was hired to make the murder look like an interrupted robbery. Then the dead woman's secrets begin to come out of the closet. Now happily married, Steve Carella and unhappily single Bert Kling are entering a city's sexual underground to find out which is more dangerous: a world where anything goes or a husband with secrets of his own. Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1477805613
First it was the strange phone calls, then the bizarre photographs. The boys of the 87th Precinct knew their arch nemesis, The Deaf Man, was back in town. Even a gruesome crucifixion and a cat burglar who leaves live kittens as his calling card could not keep Carella, Ling, Hawes, and Brown from the torment of the Deaf Man's riddles. And time was running out.
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. Imagine your favorite Law & Order cast solving fresh mysteries into infinity, with no re-runs, and you have some sense of McBain's grand, ongoing accomplishment.? ? Entertainment Weekly McBain forces us to think twice about every character we meet?even those we thought we already knew.? ? New York Times Book Review
Was the warehouse fire an accident? And why was the warehouse's security guard lying dead outside? The detectives of the 87th Precinct must listen to a bloodcurdling tape which is their best clue to solving a tangle of arson, dope, homicide and pornography.
It was exactly the sort of case Detective Steve Carella despised. One girl had been raped and murdered; another savagely knifed. A cold-blooded madman was loose in the 87th Precinct. The survivor of the slashing said she could identify her assailant in the police line-up, but he certainly wasn't Carella's prime suspect.
Detective Bert Kling has had some rough luck with women. First his fiancée Cindy Townsend was gunned down in an infamous bookstore shooting. Then there was Cindy Forrest, who informed him one day that she was in love with a doctor at work—and was gone. Now he’s finally hit the jackpot. Kling just married the beautiful model Augusta Blair, and they are about to enjoy the first night of their marriage together…until bad luck catches him again. When Kling gets out of the shower, Augusta is gone, leaving behind one shoe—and cotton soaked in chloroform. Even harder than calling Detective Steve Carella with the news is standing on the sidelines while the rest of the men do all the work. But he’ll have to—or he’ll never see her alive again. A spine-tingling race against time as the detectives of the 87th do what they do best, So Long as You Both Shall Live is an extraordinary addition to the series, an Ed McBain masterpiece that marries taut police procedure with the personal stakes of a man who stands to lose everything—again.
They never saw their executioner. Because each victim had this in common: they were blind. Steve Carella, a weary detective very much in love with his deaf wife, is stymied in a hunt that began when a Vietnam veteran, his sight taken in war, was found with his head nearly separated from his body. But as the bizarre killing spree goes on, Carella begins to look into the first victim's dreams. And what he sees is a panorama of war, sexuality, secrets, and torment -- and one man's pure, blind rage...
Calypso King George Chadderton was murdered on a September street in the 87th Precinct. Then Clara Hawkins, a black hooker, ends up the same way - from the same Smith and Wesson. Cops Carella and Meyer see little sense in it all, as the autumn rain washes their evidence away.
A young woman stops at the grocery store after work, but she never makes it home—at least not all the way. She is stabbed to death in front of her building, her groceries strewn across the cold pavement. Upstairs her neighbor and popular ghost story author Gregory Craig lay dead as well, stabbed in his apartment. When Craig’s publisher is found murdered just days later, Detective Steve Carella has a deadly mystery on his hands, one unlike any he’s ever had before. Searching for clues, Carella instead finds Craig’s girlfriend, a medium whose spooky predictions keep him guessing. When some leads take him to a “haunted” house on the New England shores, strange events turn even stranger…until, back in the city, he turns up the crucial evidence he needs to track down the killer. A rare twist in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, Ghosts weaves the haunting uneasiness of the supernatural thriller with a classic, tightly plotted police procedural. Stephen King hails Ghosts as “excellent. It’s a fine—and creepy—mystery, and a fine novel.”
A dead man lay reeking of alcohol--no forced entry, no visible wounds, and an empty bottle of seconal. It all added up to a simple suicide. Or did it? Why would an alcoholic artist, who was terrified of drugs, have ended his life with sleeping pills? It's all up to Detective Steve Carella of the 87th Precinct to uncover the real story.
Policajti zo slávneho 87. obvodu majú tentoraz objasniť vraždu muzikálovej tanečnice, ktorá sa neskoro v noci sama vracia po skončení predstavenia domov. Je mrazivá newyorská noc, plná snehu, ale sneh je aj slangový výraz pre drogy...
Begins with what looks like a lynching and turns out to be a race for a publicity-conscious killer with a taste for young, female sports stars, while Kling's girlfriend Eileen stalks a highly systematic rapist. The author also wrote "Eight Balck Horses"
Sees the return of the Deaf Man - taunting the boys of the 87th Precinct with enigmatic messages and ill deeds, specially for Christmas. The author also wrote "Lightning".
Jerome McKennon's last phone call before he died had been to a woman called Marilyn. On the evidence of her answer phone, a very popular woman and a prime suspect in the case. For Hal Willis of the 87th Precinct, this would be far more than just another crime investigation.
The squadroom at 5:15 on New Year's morning looked much as it did on any other day... But an exceptionally heinous crime was already sending a wave of outrage through even the veteran cops of the 87th Precinct: a wealthy couple, returning home from New Year's festivities, discovered their baby -- and the infant's teenage sitter -- murdered. Parents themselves, detectives Carella and Meyer resolve to bring in the perpetrator at any cost. Meanwhile, gang warfare is overtaking the city's streets, threatening its very foundation. A sinister song of death and destruction echoes through the 87th, and it isn't "Auld Lang Syne."
The latest Ed McBain novel of the 87th Precinct. A young Catholic priest is brutally stabbed to death in his garden. A church practising satanism is not four blocks away and the cult sign of Baphomet is found scrawled on the garden gate.
The beautiful blonde in the penthouse apartment was dead, her face and body laced with slashes from a paring knife -- grisly evidence of the terrible things the city can do to pretty young women. What sordid web of money, sex, and greed had ensnared Susan Brauer? The stack of unsigned erotic letters in her possession was the first clue. Then the murder of Susan's lover, a married lawyer in his sixties, leads the cops of the 87th to the women left behind: the lawyer's wife, his ex, his daughters. And for Detective Carella, his own father's senseless death in a bakery holdup sears through the intense summer heat -- and sends him on a fevered hunt for the one who made his mother a widow and shrouded his family in grief.
When Emma Bowles is pushed under a train and then run down on the street where she lives, it is clear someone wants her dead. Even after her husband hires a private investigator to protect her, something is still very wrong. This is an 87th Precinct novel.
Steve Carella of the 87th Precinct faces the precinct's greatest foe, the Deaf Man, when the criminal returns to a life of crime in order to murder the city's graffiti artists
A peaceful Christmas Eve turns riotous when the members of the 87th Precinct bring in a kid who has stolen a sheep from the zoo to give to his sister, a pawnshop robber with a bag of gold, and a pregnant woman who promptly gives birth behind the filing ca
87th Precinct detectives Carella and Hawes investigate the murder of an old woman who had once graced the great stages of Europe as a concert pianist, while elsewhere in Isola another woman is dying for the price of a song. Reprint.
In this city, you have to pay attention. In this city, things are happening all the time, all over the place, and you don't have to be a detective to smell evil in the wind. Take this week's tabloids: the face of a dead girl is splashed across the front page. She was found sprawled near a park bench not seven blocks from the police station. Detectives Carella and Brown soon discover the girl has a most unusual past. Meanwhile, the late-night news tracks the exploits of The Cookie Boy, a professional thief who leaves his calling card -- a box of chocolate chip cookies -- at the scene of each score. And while the detectives of the 87th Precinct are investigating these cases, one of them is being stalked by the man who killed his father. Welcome to the Big Bad City.
The fiftieth novel in the 87th Precinct series is a gritty, witty tour-de force combining violence, fear and treachery with Ed McBain's inimitable leavening of laughter and selfless heroism.
Cassandra Lee Ridley is an ex-airforce pilot who now scrapes a living flying low level contraband over the border to Mexico. But when she gets offered a $200,000 contract to fly what she assumes are drugs, she takes a deep breath and agrees to do it. The job goes perfectly, the deliveries are made and the money paid to the Mexican drug lords. One problem though. All $1.7 million dollars of the payment are fake, the Mexicans soon want their money - and Cassandra is their first stop and first fatality. When her naked body is thrown to the lions in a zoo in the 87th Precinct, New York, it becomes Detective Steve Carella's problem . . .
"Lester Henderson has it all. Widely tipped to be the next mayor he faces a glorious future - until he is gunned down by person or persons unknown. At that point he becomes Ollie Week's problem. Uncharacteristically first to the scene, Ollie lands the murder of the decade. But the crime is overshadowed by a deed more repugnant. Ollie's life work is his novel. Honed by countless rejection letters, it is finally ready to be inflicted on the nation when the one and only manuscript is stolen from Week's car by a thief who is convinved that Ollie's opus contains the secret location of a hoard of diamonds ..." - back cover.
Říká se, že spisovatel, matematik a fotograf, jehož svět zná pod jménem Lewis Caroll, byl milý, zábavný člověk, který měl rád děti. A právě jeho nesmyslné verše o Tlachapoudovi z knížky laskavých a ztřeštěných vyprávění o Alence učinil Ed McBain průvodcem po svém temném příběhu. Jde v něm o únos a o vraždu. A taky o chamtivost, to především. Aby to nebylo tak jednoduché, vloží se do případu FBI. Federální agenti shlížejí na místní detektivy svrchu, ale každý čtenář McBainových příběhů o 87. revíru ví, že Steve Carella a jeho kolegové jsou prostě nejlepší a pachatele vypátrají, i kdyby jim šlapal na paty celý pluk federálů.
The disappearance of singer Tamar Valparaiso, a young woman on the verge of launching a successful career in hip hop music, draws Steve Carella into the middle of a kidnapping case as he searches for the missing woman.
Gloria Stanford was very sexy, very rich and very, very dead. Found in her plush, city apartment, she had been shot twice in the heart. All her credit cards and ID were gone but apart from that there seemed no motive at all. It¿s only when the detective-in-charge, Steve Carella, starts to receive bizarre cryptic notes in the mail that he realises something bigger than a simple homicide is going on. It seems the Deaf Man is back - a notorious crook and killer who has a morbid fascination with puzzles and anagrams. Long thought dead, he¿s back on the loose and wants his long-hidden millions back¿
This installment in the 87th Precinct series finds the detectives stumped by a serial killer who doesn't fit the profile. 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 out walking her dog—these are the seemingly random targets shot twice in the face. But most serial killers don't use guns. Most serial killers don't strike five times in two weeks. And most serial killers' prey share something more than being over fifty years of age. Now it falls to Detective Steve Carella and his colleagues in the 87th Precinct to find out what-or whom-the victims had in common before another body is found.With trademark wit and sizzling dialogue, McBain unravels a mystery and examines the dreams we chase in the darkening hours before the fiddlers have fled.
See Them Die : "Kill me if you can" was Pepe Miranda's challenge. Murderer, two-bit hero of the street gangs, he was holed up somewhere in the 87th Precinct, making the cops look like fools and cheered on by every neighbourhood punk. Not a challenge the detectives in the squadroom could leave alone.
Představujeme vám případy z 87. revíru, které se odehrávají v krátkém časovém období. Povídky, i když často opomíjené, jsou pro autory výzvou k kondenzaci děje a vyjádření podstatného. Ed McBain byl mistrem v tomto žánru a jeho povídky ukazují, jak detektivové 87. revíru čelí různým výzvám.
Jedním z příběhů je vražda předem ohlášená, kdy policisté obdrží vzkaz: Dnes večer v 8 zabiju Lady. Jak mohou zasáhnout, když zatím nemají konkrétního podezřelého? Čas běží a hrozí smrt nevinné ženy, což vyžaduje preventivní opatření.
Další příběh, Příliš tiché hodiny, zkoumá smrt dvou dívek, jedné chudé a jedné bohaté. Detektiv Steve Carella pátrá po spojitosti mezi jejich úmrtími, zatímco detektiv Hawes se zaplétá do vyšetřování vraždy, která se zdá být složitější, než se na první pohled zdá.
V příběhu Všichni do jednoho se setkáváme s ubodanou striptérkou, dopisem od Anděla pomsty, bombovým útokem na kostel a detektivem Andym Parkerem, který se ocitá v ohrožení života. Sobotní noc v 87. revíru začíná dramaticky a autor mistrně vede čtyři dějové linie k napínavému rozuzlení.
Provokatér; Poldové; Není hluchý jako hluchý Z více než tří desítek autorových detektivních románů o 87. revíru amerického velkoměsta, v nichž vystupuje tým známých detektivů, byly do svazku vybrány ty, jež spojuje postava domněle nedoslýchavého zločince. Volná trilogie obráží brutální tvář americké velkoměstské zločinnosti.
Provokatér, Poldové, Není hluchý jako hluchý.
3 příběhy z 87. revíru.
Postavu zdánlivě nepolapitelného zločince Hluchého představil Ed McBain celkem třikrát. Stalo se tak v době, kdy jím smyšlené zločiny a bezmocná neohrabanost policie nápadně připomínaly skutečnost: americká veřejnost byla traumatizována atentáty na vysoce postavené státní úředníky a politiky a popularita policie se pohybovala hluboko pod bodem mrazu.
Here are excerpts from more than 30 years of Grand Master Ed McBain's bestselling 87th Precinct series of police procedurals, featuring some of his most lovable female characters. "If you are already a fan, here is a reunion of some old friends".--St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Ve svém pokoji je nalezen mrtvý překupník drog. Vše nasvědčuje tomu, že se mladík oběsil. Detektivové z 87. revíru v čele se Stevem Carellou však zakrátko zjistí, že jde pouze o fingovanou sebevraždu, protože oběť ve skutečnosti zemřela na předávkování heroinem. Někdo se snaží policisty přelstít. Detektivové stojí před řadou otázek. Kdo se je snaží svést na falešnou stopu? Proč chtěl neznámý pachatel vyvolat dojem, že překupník odešel ze života dobrovolně? Komu patří otisky prstů na injekční stříkačce, kterou policie našla vedle mrtvého? Kdo nastoupil na mladíkovo místo v obchodu s drogami ve městě? Kdo zavraždil překupníkovu sestru Marii? A kdo má na svědomí výhrůžné telefonáty, které přicházejí na policii? Do hledání nebezpečného pachatele se pouštějí detektivové Carella a Byrnes. Vědí, že musejí jednat rychle a zároveň nesmírně opatrně, protože i jim jde o život. Byl pohledný, elegantní, zazobaný – ale mrtvý! Vyděrač Sy Kramer, který zašel příliš daleko, vyfasoval svůj poslední žold – kulku do hlavy. Která z jeho obětí měla tolik co ztratit, že musela vraždit? Je to politikova přitažlivá manželka? Nebo majitel podniku na limonády? Nebo je to ona neznámá oběť, která zajistila Kramerovi tučné vklady na spořitelní knížce? Třeba je to jiný vyděrač, který převzal Kramerovy „zákazníky“.
McBain Trio is the 2nd volume of Mystery Guild's Lost Classics Omnibus Series. With a new introduction by the author, this edition show-cases Detectives Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer in three of their toughest and finest cases. ** Lullaby, Vespers, and Widows. **
