Ice by Ed McBain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] and suddenly she was more frightened that she'd ever been in her life, and she heard herself telling them the name, heard herself giving away her secret and her freedom, saying the name over and over again, babbling the name, and thought that would truly be the end of it, and was astonished to see the razor flashing out again, [...]"

Ice is quite a strong entry in Ed McBain's formidable 87 Precinct saga. Published in 1983 it is the 36th installment in the series, one in which the author has some fun with the title. Polysemic words are fun in general, but one of the possible meanings of the title is far from obvious (at least that's what I, a non-native English speaker, suspect.)

A young dancer and aspiring actress is gunned down when she is walking back home from a performance. The 87th Precinct detectives are drawn into that case but not until we witness hectic scenes at the precinct that involve a band of drunks arrested along with a pregnant hooker. Naturally, the story culminates with childbirth in the precinct. The author uses the scenes to introduce the group of characters - Carella, Hawes, Genero, Willis, and Meyer Meyer, with all the unbearably repetitive phrases - "white streak," "slanted eyes," "five feet eight inches tall," etc.

Carella finds out that the same gun was used in killing the dancer as in a shooting that happened a few days earlier. There occurs yet another murder and the complexity of the case grows. The author uses various side stories to enliven the procedural plot. Some - not all - are maudlin, lame, or cliché, like, for instance, Detective Kling's tribulations after the divorce from Augusta, and his obsessive thinking about "the gun."

There is an uncharacteristically brutal, for McBain's books, scene of torturing a woman with a razor (the epigraph contains a short passage) This horrifying scene is central to the arc of the plot and is certainly not gratuitous like brutal scenes in so many authors' books, aimed at titillating the readers with porn of gore. Also, the scene is even more gut-wrenching because it does not show much of what is done to the victim but is viewed partly from the victim's point of view who imagines what will be done to her.

There is even some humor in the book. My wife tells me that I have a 12-year-old-boy's sense of humor, but isn't the following passage really funny:

"[he] had an erection, but perhaps that was due to the supreme satisfaction of having beaten that pool hustler to within an inch of his life; it was sometimes difficult to separate and categorize emotions, especially when it was so cold outside."

And finally, perhaps the best feature of the novel: the characters of Brother Anthony and Fat Emma - an unforgettable duo whose portrayal confirms Ed McBain's literary talent: they seem to be such cliché evil characters, yet from the pages of the book they come close to real people.

Three stars.



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