Book info

• Title Killer's Payoff
• Author Ed McBain
• Year 1958
• Genre Mystery

It’s like an old-time gangster movie: a speeding car, a blazing gun…and suddenly a guy walking down the street without a care in the world is lying in the gutter without a head on his shoulders. But who pulled the high-powered trigger that turned Sy Kramer from a blackmailer into a chalk outline? Was it the politician’s wife with a pornographic past? The soda-pop tycoon desperate to keep a business-busting bungle bottled up? Or was it whoever was paying Kramer a small fortune to hide what must’ve been one very big bad? It falls to detectives Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes of the 87th Precinct to pound the pavement of the city and beat the bushes of the backwoods for the suspect with the best motive, the most blistering weapon, and the biggest set of brass ones. En route, they’ll meet pretty ladies and petty lowlifes, great white hunters and gray flannel ad execs, and, when the going gets rough, maybe even their match. It’s all in several long days’—and even longer nights’—work for the guys who make their living behind the badge, and under the gun.

Thoughts

My efforts to make headway in the 87th Precinct series have taken a step forward after the books (all of them, I think) were made available via the Kindle Unlimited subscription platform. I’m only testing out whether I get much use out of this subscription at the moment, but with so many of these books to get through, I might just!

I’m not sure whether it was the change in focus to Cotton Hawes, or because I’m really getting to know the characters now, but I enjoyed this one enormously. It felt like we really got to follow the case and all its twists and turns, and I loved watching the central character fall in love over and over again.

The introductions continue to suggest the author wasn’t too fond of these books, or the direction the series was heading in, but I like the simplicity of the stories, particularly when compared to the more modern crime novels that can get wrapped up in knots!

Rating: 4 / 5