Ed McBain

Matthew Hope has been mysteriously shot--by whom? As he lies in a hospital bed in a near-coma, his friends try to discover why his professional involvement with a small circus had murderous results. To do this they must traverse a web of sinister acrobats, kinky animal trainers, and beautiful businesswomen--one of whom is a ruthless killer.

Matthew Hope is at the end of his spiritual rope. He's divorced from his wife, recovering from a coma and tired of living in Calusa, Florida. When Jill Lawton hires him to find her husband, who's been seen "up north" with another woman, Hope thinks it's just another failed marriage ... until a body washes up on the beach with no face and Jack Lawton's driver's license in his pocket.

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.

Romance and drama capture police detectives Carella and Kling of the 87th Precinct in McBain's Manhattan clone, Isola City. An actress in a play about an actress who gets stabbed is stabbed. Her superficial wound draws little blood but enough media attention, perhaps, to save the drama from the opening-night closing its director expects. The play is titled Romance, a subject very much the focus of Kling's personal life as he doggedly pursues another...

"Who butchered a troubled young priest in his own church? Did an overzealous gang of neighborhood Satanists have a hand in the the bloody business? Or were there even darker doings behind the ornate closed doors of St. Catherine's? In a parish torn by sin, violence, drugs, racial tension and poverty, the cops of the 87th Precinct must throw the first stone -- and hope it makes ripples in a bizarre and baffling case that will test their faith, their...

A nun is murdered in New York City and an autopsy determines she had breast implants. Detectives Steve Carella and Artie Brown discover that Sister Mary Vincent led a double life.

Toy designer Lainie Commins sues her boss for patent infringement, claiming he stole her cross-eyed bear. When the man is killed aboard his yacht in Florida, Lainie is accused of murder. Lawyer Mathew Hope takes up her defense.

Once she had filled the concert halls of Europe with beautiful music. Once her name had been in headlines, her performances heralded in newspaper around the world. Now she lay dead on the cold floor of a cold apartment on the coldest night of the year: a little old woman with a shattered bottle of cheap liquor by her bady and two fatal gunshot wounds to her chest Svetlana Dyalovich, found dead at midnight, was one more homicide in one more endless...