The Con Man

Name: The Con Man
Rating: 3.91 (3917 reviews)
Author: Ed McBain

87th Precinct • Book 4

by Ed McBain

3.91 Goodreads

(3.9K ratings)

201 pages Published 1957 Mystery

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Why You'll Love This

Ed McBain turns a tattooed corpse and a charming grifter into a razor-tight procedural that never wastes a single page.

Great if you want: classic street-level police work without psychological overcomplication
The experience: fast, no-frills, and propulsive — reads in a single sitting easily
The writing: McBain writes in short, punchy scenes — cinematic before cinema owned crime fiction
Skip if: you prefer deep character interiority over plot-driven momentum

About This Book

In the grimy streets of Isola, charm is a weapon and trust is a vulnerability. Ed McBain's fourth 87th Precinct novel follows Detective Steve Carella as he hunts a con man who has graduated from fleecing the gullible to something far more dangerous. The premise is deceptively simple — a body in the river, a single tattoo as a clue — but what McBain builds from that starting point is a portrait of human greed, loneliness, and the particular cruelty of those who exploit both. The con man at the center of this story is no cartoon villain; he's disturbingly recognizable, and that's what makes him unsettling.

McBain's great gift is compression. At barely two hundred pages, The Con Man wastes nothing — every scene pulls weight, every exchange reveals character. His prose has the clipped rhythm of someone who trusts readers to keep up, and the precinct procedural structure grounds the story in an unglamorous, believable reality that most crime fiction of the era couldn't match. Reading it feels less like genre entertainment and more like spending a few hours inside a city that actually breathes.