The Big Bad City by Ed McBain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"First thing you had to understand about this city was that it was big. [...] This city was dangerous too. [...] Bad things happened in this city every hour of the day or night, and they happened all over the city. [...] In this city, things were happening all the time, all over the place, and you didn't have to be a detective to smell evil in the wind."

August in the big city. Oppressive heat despite the late hour. Chaos in the 87th Precinct house. An altercation between two suspects in custody results in one of them getting wounded. The detectives are forced to shoot at the attacker. At the same time, nine handcuffed basketball players are led into the precinct house - the tenth has been killed, and all nine are the suspects.

The body of a strangled young woman is found in a city park. Detectives Carella and Brown lead the investigation. Detectives Meyer and Kling are trying to find the perpetrator in a string of residential burglaries. Sonny, a small criminal, who had killed Carella's father during a robbery ( Widows), is out of prison early. He plans to kill Carella so the detective does not kill him in the act of revenge. The three main story lines of the novel are thus set up.

While it turns out that the strangled young woman was a nun some details soon discovered seem incompatible with the finding. I don't usually pay much attention to the plot, but I have to admit that this story line is captivating, superbly paced and structured, and its denouement is quite logical and plausible, unlike the silly artificial twists and turns in most crime novels. Furthermore, there is yet another story nested within this plot thread.

The perpetrator of residential thefts is known as Cookie Boy in the media because of his "signature" - in the burglarized apartments he leaves a box of cookies he baked himself. Yet his newest burglary does not go as planned and the reader gets a fascinating story within a story about how things go monstrously wrong.

Carella is turning 40, which may bring the reader to realize that the 87th Precinct series time runs much slower than in the real world. Carella was in his late twenties in 1956, when the first novel in the series ( Cop Hater) was published, so it took him 43 years to age about 10 years.

In my view, Big Bad City (1999) is a very good novel, one of the best installments in the series!

Four stars.


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