Ten Plus One
87th Precinct • Book 17
by Ed McBain, Dick Hill
Why You'll Love This
A sniper is picking off seemingly unconnected victims, and McBain makes you feel the dread of a city holding its breath.
- Great if you want: tight procedural plotting with a gritty 1960s New York feel
- The experience: lean and propulsive — 160 pages that don't waste a single one
- The writing: McBain strips prose to muscle — sharp dialogue, no sentimentality
- Skip if: you expect deep character development over plot momentum
About This Book
A sniper is picking off victims across the city, and the detectives of the 87th Precinct can't find a pattern. The targets seem to have nothing in common — different ages, different neighborhoods, different lives. As the body count climbs, the pressure mounts not just professionally but personally, and the investigation takes on the kind of urgency that makes a 160-page novel feel like it's moving at a dead sprint. McBain builds dread from randomness, which turns out to be far more unsettling than the usual motive-driven crime.
What makes this entry in the long-running 87th Precinct series stand out is McBain's stripped-down precision. He wastes nothing — every scene earns its place, every exchange between detectives carries both character and plot. The prose is tight and unsentimental, with a dry wit that keeps the darkness from becoming oppressive. McBain understood that a procedural lives or dies on the believability of its working cops, and here they feel genuinely human — frustrated, dogged, fallible. It's crime fiction doing exactly what the form does best.
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