Ed McBain

Another novel in the greatest of all post-war American crime series.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 . . .

From the author who wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's THE BIRDSFor the first time Evan Hunter and Ed McBain, two extraordinary and diverse talents, fuse to form a brilliant and powerful novel of two halves'That it works so superbly is a tribute to the skills of this great storyteller' NEW YORK TIMESBenjamin Thorpe is married, a father, a successful Los Angeles architect - and a man obsessed. Alone in New York City on business, he spends the empty hours of the night in a compulsive search for female companionship. His dizzying descent leads to an early morning confrontation in a mid-town brothel, and a subsequent searing self-revelation.Cathy Frese - aka Heidi-the-teenage-hooker - finishes up for the night and walks back to her studio apartment. But she never arrives. Her strangled, used and mutilated body is found in an alleyway the next morning.These two lost souls had crossed briefly in the night, and as the foggy events of the night before come into sharper focus, Benjamin Thorpe becomes an ever more possible suspect...

Benjamin Smoke is a retired police lieutenant who walked away from teh job fo rone reason alone: he was bored. Bored of the criminals. Bored of the crimes. Bored of answers that came too easy, too fast, and too often the same. Now, working as an unlicensed private detective, Smoke finally gets his wish. Someone has committed the perfect crime -- a perfectly senseless crime -- by stealing a dead body. And when Smoke starts investigating he's in for one surprise after another, from black magic to murder and a woman who believes she's Cleopatra -- and is lighting a fire right before Smoke's eyes...

Detectives Carella and Hawes of the 87th Precinct investigate the murder of an elderly woman, once one of the greatest concert pianists of the century, while 88th Precinct cop Fat Ollie Weeks trails three prep-school boys and a crack dealer responsible for a vicious attack on a prostitute.