McBain Ed download all books 63 books

Twenty stories from the man who created the 87th Precinct. Stories of the street and the city, stories of the cops and their prey. Life in a Chinese lobster-shop, the making of a porn queen, and the agony of being jailed with a non-stop talking cellmate. Places and people only he could describe.

SUMMARY:Two a.m. in the bitter cold of winter: the young Hispanic man's body is found in a tenement basement. The rope around his neck suggests a clear case of suicide - until the autopsy reveals he'd overdosed on heroin. He was a pusher, and now a thousand questions press 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 is 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 trip.

“Consolation,” which appeared in is one of his more recent tales; this powerful, uncompromising, and sexually explicit story of two small-time criminals named Colley and Jocko was later revised and incorporated into the McBain novel published that same year.

Patrolman Richard Genero couldn’t see clearly the driving rain. The man — or perhaps the tall woman — standing at the bus stop was dressed entirely in black. Black raincoat, black slacks, black shoes, black umbrella which hid the head and hair. A bus pulled to the curb, spreading a canopy of water. The door snapped open. The person — man or woman — boarded the bus and the rain-streaked doors closed, hiding the black-shrouded figure from view. The bus pulled away from the curb, spreading another canopy of water which soaked Genero’s trouser legs.

“Hey!” he yelled after the bus. “You forgot your bag!”

Genera picked up the bag — a small, blue overnight bag issued by an airline. He unzipped the bag and reached into it. Then he gripped the bus-stop sign for support.

The bag held... a severed human hand.

The police lab gave both bag and hand a thorough examination and discovered next to nothing. Steve Carella, Cotton Hawes, Meyer Meyer and the other 87th Precinct detectives had a murderer to find, and they had to begin without even knowing who the victim was.

The Missing Persons Bureau files supplied two leads, both of which led nowhere.

Everything that looked even faintly like a clue was checked and double-checked and they all led to the same place — a dead end.

Then, when the break finally came and several clues turned up at once, they neatly contradicted each other. It was the toughest case the 87th Precinct detectives had ever faced.

Prudence Ann Markham was as careful as her name. Before heading out to her car in the deserted parking lot she packed up the film she’d been editing, checked the studio gear, set the alarm, and locked the outer door. It was 10:40 P.M. — but Prudence Ann never made it to 10:45.

Carlton Barnaby Markham didn’t know what his wife had been working on at the time of her death. All he knew was that the film was missing...  and that he was in Calusa County Jail, charged with her murder.

For Matthew Hope, the months since he’d decided to switch to criminal law had not been encouraging. He’d lost his first case and refused his second. When Carlton Markham says he is innocent, Hope takes the case. But as he digs into the evidence, it becomes clear that it will take more than claims of innocence to spring his client...

Ed McBain, author of the best-selling 87th Precinct novels, now takes you Downtown in a bold, new departure of a novel that will make you laugh, cry, and tingle with the special brand of electrifying suspense that only McBain knows how to generate.

Downtown you’ll meet Michael Barnes, a lone out-of-town businessman in New York City on Christmas Eve with a couple of hours to kill before his plane leaves. It promises to be a sweet interlude when he meets a lovely blonde in a bar. But first his identification and all his money are stolen, and next his rental car—only to resurface on the other side of town with an unexpected passenger: a corpse.

Here are every reader’s brightest, glittering fantasies and blackest nightmares about the Big Apple: big-shot movie producers, muggers with the instincts of Vietnamese guerillas, cops who arrest the victims, mobsters who embrace you, thugs who tie you up, beautiful women who take you into their limousines, beautiful women who try to drive their stiletto heels through your skull, warehouses full of furs, jewels, and other valuables, smoky gambling dens in Chinatown, ritzy penthouse apartments, miserable dives …

Michael Barnes has only twenty-four hours to survive the wildest ride in his life. It’s going to take every last ounce of his cunning and guts, and it’s going to be the fastest, funniest twenty-four hours ever packed into one novel. Just published in England to an ovation from the critics, Downtown has “a plot to match Hitchcock in its bizarre twists and sneaky deceptions” (The Daily Telegraph).

Here is an irresistibly charming tale, beautifully packaged in a small, illustrated and slipcased gift book. All’s quiet at the 87th Precinct on Christmas Eve... until Steve Carella’s fellow detectives appear with a kid who’s stolen a sheep, a robber with a bagful of gold, two guys fighting over a sack of frankincense, and a young couple who give birth to a baby boy at midnight!

“And All Through the House” was first published in Playboy in December, 1984.

They were dead, the husband and wife. Both were shot in the face at close range with a shotgun. The husband, in fact, still had his finger on the trigger, the barrel pointing toward what used to be a significant portion of his head. It was clearly a suicide — or did it just look that way? For Detectives Steve Carella and Bert Kling, what seems to be the truth on the surface often reveals something far different underneath.

A killer is murdering married women and their husbands. But setting up shop in the 87th Precinct was the wrong move. Carella and Kling don’t buy the suicide theory, and soon enough they are on the killer’s trail. The only trouble is the murderous crime wave ripping through the city has gathered momentum.

Goldilocks... The Other Woman

Goldilocks-stealing into someone else’s house, with no particular interest in the chairs or the porridge, but with more than a passing fascination with Poppa Bear’s bed.

On the steamy west coast of Florida, in the quiet of their home, a woman and her two little girls have been brutally murdered. None of the alibis add up. The one person who couldn’t possibly have a motive for the crime is the only one confessing to it, and he insists on Matthew Hope for his defense. Now Matt finds himself tangled in the unravelling threads of three heartless killings in which every half-sister, stepson, and first wife could have had a hand.

Somebody’s lying.

Maybe everybody.

A sunny, quiet, perfectly ordinary school day in autumn turns suddenly dark when sixteen-year-old Rebecca Patton runs down and kills a pedestrian during a driving lesson. It all happens so quickly, so inexplicably, like an accident. The victim — a woman carrying a red handbag — had been stepping off the curb at the corner of Grove and Third. Then she was lying in the street, in critical condition.

When police detective Katie Logan arrives at the station house, she finds a distraught but cooperative Rebecca. Her driving instructor, Andrew Newell, is totally disoriented, however. He appears to be drunk. Or on drugs. Certainly, his apparent incompetence warrants his arrest in what has now become a case of negligent homicide.

The situation in this adroitly told tale by a master at the top of his form grows far more sinister, though, when Logan learns that the victim’s handbag has been recovered. It identifies the dead woman as Andrew Newell’s wife.

When the affable owner of a checkered-tablecloth restaurant in Little Italy is cut down by the bullets of a pair of ski-masked thugs, Fifth Precinct Police Detective Reardon has his hands too full to give a damn about some odd things going on uptown. For instance, why does a noted Madison Avenue art lover suddenly decide to sell his entire collection in an effort to raise a cool million? And why was a well-known Arab oil magnate assassinated?

Almost too late, Reardon sees the connection between the deaths of a multi-millionaire and a smalltime restaurateur, and the fluctuations in the international markets for crude oil, fine art, and precious metals. And now that he knows the truth, just how long has he got to live?

ANOTHER PART OF THE CITY is a brilliant, hard-hitting foray into Manhattan’s tangled web of twisting downtown streets and crooked uptown lives.

Stan Gifford is the ultimate comedian. A pro through and through, when Stan’s act dies, so does he—in front of forty million viewers from coast to coast, including the 87th Precinct’s Steve Carella. But what seemed to be death by natural causes quickly turns into a case of murder, and Carella must unravel the motivations behind the comedian’s final act. Meanwhile, Cindy Forrest has been working to put herself through college since the sniper who held the city hostage three years ago murdered her father. But now she’s in the crosshairs, and the only thing standing between her and a killer is Detective Bert Kling of the 87th Precinct.

Eighty-six-year-old George Lasser was the superintendent of a building in the 87th Precinct until just recently. Unfortunately his tenure ended in the building’s basement with a sharp, heavy blade of an ax in his head… There are no witnesses, no suspects, and no clues. The wife and son? They’re both a little off-kilter, but they have alibis. Just when Carella and Hawes are about to put the case on the shelf, the killer strikes again. Now the detectives are hot on the trail of a man crazy enough to murder with an ax. One of the 87th Precinct series’ finest installments, is a sharp, intense crime thriller that is classic Ed McBain. hails it as “the best of today’s police stories—lively, inventive, convincing, suspenseful, and wholly satisfactory.

When Anthony Forrest walked out of the office building, the only thoughts on his mind were of an impending birthday and a meeting with his wife for dinner. And a deadly bullet saw to it that they were the last thoughts on his mind. The problem for Detectives Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer of the 87th Precinct is that Forrest isn’t alone. An anonymous sniper is unofficially holding the city hostage, frustrating the police as one by one the denizens of Isola drop like flies. With fear gripping the citizenry and the pressure on the 87th mounting, finding a killer whose victims are random is the greatest challenge the detectives have ever faced — and the deadliest game the city has ever known. A gritty, relentless pressure cooker of a thriller, is one of bestselling author Ed McBain’s finest, the ultimate addition to the 87th Precinct series where time threatens to stand still and murder rules the day.

Three chillers from the files of the 87th Precinct: A young, wealthy woman is found strangled to death in a slum apartment leaving behind only her name, some cancelled checks, and an unknown killer in The Empty Hours ... A big, ugly "J" is painted on the synagogue wall by a killer who had brutally stabbed the rabbi on Passover ... A bright red pool of blood spread into the snow as Cotton Hawes watched his quiet ski weekend turn into a hunt for a ski-slope slayer in Storm.

A killer is out for blood, and it’s up to Detective Steve Carella to bring him in ― but a shocking surprise awaits when a survivor fingers the suspect in a lineup.

Matthew Hope spots her on Saturday, exquisitely beautiful, strolling topless on the beach. On Monday, she shows up in his law office, beaten and bruised, ready to file for divorce. By Tuesday, she is dead — and her big, ugly husband is arrested for murder. But Matthew believes he is innocent; now, he has to prove it.

Twenty stories from the man who created the 87th Precinct. Stories of the street and the city, stories of the cops and their prey. Life in a Chinese lobster-shop, the making of a porn queen, and the agony of being jailed with a non-stop talking cellmate. Places and people only he could describe.