Widows

The long-lived 87th Precinct series (1956 and into the 2000s) was a masterpiece in its entirety, but some entries stand out from the rest. This is one of the gems. As with many of the single name titles (Heat, Ice, etc.), Widows turns out to mean a lot of things to a lot of people – and includes murder. Det. Steve Carella has a lot on his plate. His mother has just been widowed, when his father was fatally shot during a robbery. His sister’s husband is up to something, and she’s about to give birth. The squad is investigating multiple shooting deaths, and one suspect is a grass widow…that is, her husband found the grass was greener elsewhere and dumped her. There are, as always, ongoing subplots, and they merge when Det. Eileen Burke, newly part of the hostage negotiating team, is called upon when some murderers are cornered. Eileen is working on her (currently non-existent) relationship with Det. Bert Kling. If you’ve been reading this series, you know that Bert never has any luck with women. Never. Will things improve now? The plotting is clever, the characters are rounded, the dialogue is witty, and the author’s politics are inserted with some humor. There’s also a subtle twist at the end that’s worth a second thought.

This book was written much later than when the series first started. With that said even with the advances in technology the premise is still the same, there has been a major crime or crime and the detectives of the 87th Precinct have to solve it. This time there has been a series of murders, all related to a man and his mistress. While Carella and company try to solve this crime Carella is having to deal with the murder of his father and letting other detectives try to find his father’s murderer. Meanwhile Kling and Eileen Burke drift farther apart and she takes a new job as a hostage negotiator. If this is your first time reading the 87th Precinct series you will still enjoy the book as most on-going story lines are explained. I didn’t find this book quite up to the standards of others in this series and as he did in later books in this series the author has put a little more graphic sexual situations in this book if that kind of thing bothers you. His earlier books don’t have that as much.

There are a few problems with this story and then there are some basic problems with the general layout of these books in the Kindle versions.

I have read 8 McBain books now and there is one very basic and very problematic issue. I am not sure if this issue is in the hard copy versions or not but the author shifts rapidly from one scene to the next. Normally in books this is handled by having a new paragraph block for each separate scene. In these kindle versions there is no new paragraph block. Scenes merge into the same paragraph and it is difficult to immediately tell if there is a new scene. This makes reading the books a little difficult. As I have never read an Ed McBain in a hard copy I am not sure if this is due to author preference or if the Kindle translation is incorrect. I can’t imagine an editor letting something so sloppy go out so I am blaming it on the kindle translation.

The problem I have specific to this book and stop if you don’t want spoilers, is that the confession by the person responsible for the murders is so poorly set up that I simply don’t believe anyone would do that. First the murderer has an attorney present who lets the murderer confess without trying to stop her or guard against any potentially incriminating statement. The “evidence” that is brought against her is that her fingerprints might be on some letters and her typewriter might be the one that was used to write some letters. However all the letters do is to illuminate an affair the woman had. However it is a long way from saying yes you have evidence that I had an affair to saying yes the fact that I had an affair means I killed these people. The police have no other evidence linking this suspect to anything criminal. It isn’t illegal to have an affair and lying about an affair doesn’t make you a murderer. So while the police can think anything they want until they have some much better evidence there is no reason to confess. After almost every confession that isn’t the result of a plea bargain is done because the suspect is tired of lying and wants to give up. However the suspect’s thoughts that we have read earlier do not indicate any such feeling, rather she is happy she is doing it and getting away with it. Any decent criminal defense attorney would tell her immediately to keep her mouth shut.

For a writer that has written some of the best dialogue between police and between suspects in the history of this genre, the set up and dialogue in the confession is borderline ridiculous and is totally at odds with the rest of the novel.

A string of murders has suddenly left a proliferation of widows in the 87th Precinct, and one of the cases hits especially close to home for the detectives of the precinct.

The first victim is a beautiful young woman named Susan Brauer, who is viciously stabbed to death with a small knife. She leaves no widow behind, but she does leave a collection of intensely erotic letters, from her lover, a married lawyer. When the lawyer is then killed, he does leave a beautiful widow along with a safe deposit box full of erotic letters that apparently constitute the other half of Susan Brauer’s correspondence.

Most of the obvious suspects, including the lawyer’s widow and daughters, seem to have solid alibis, and detectives Carella and Brown suddenly have a very knotty case on their hands. Then, Carella’s father, a baker, is shot to death in his store, leaving Carella grieving and his mother a widow.

Carella’s father was murdered in another neighborhood, and Carella is forced to let the detectives of that precinct work the case. But naturally, he is desperate to see that the case is pursued to a successful conclusion. The narrative moves back and forth between the two investigations, each of which is difficult and complex in its own way, and this turns out to be another very engaging story. Another winner from one of the masters of crime fiction.

good book

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