Another excellent mystery from the 87th. What really shone for me in this one is McBain's ability to create living, breathing, believable characters in just a few pages. And then kill them. ( )

“Nobody thinks about death on a nice spring day.”

Thus begins the 17th book of the 87th Precinct. And in this one, the detectives have to stop a sniper who is gunning down victims at a steady clip! And, “Peacetime snipers are wholesale murderers.” Poor Carella and Meyer, the bulls that caught this squeal… and poor anyone who is caught in the sniper's sights!

Another good read by Mr. McBain! There is only the one story in this one, and it's a pretty darn good one! Good pacing, great dialogue, and good characters! Can't wait to read the next one! ( )

One of the better 87th Street Precinct books. A sniper is killing what, at first, appear to be successful businessmen with standard routines, but then a prositute, district attorney, and fruit/vegetable vendor are killed. One of the victim's daughter provides Steve Carella wth a key piece of evidence -- a 20 year old playbill, which provides the critical link between the victims. Suspenseful. Excellent detecting. ( )

A successful businessman, a lawyer, a prostitute, an assistant district attorney, the immigrant owner of a greengrocer, an insurance agent, a housewife. A sniper is loose on the rooftops of the big city. His targets are seemingly random, connected to each other by nothing obvious. He leaves behind nothing except the bullets in his victims. The very capriciousness strikes terror in the hearts of the citizeens. Despite the appalling paucity of clues, Steve Carella and his colleagues in the 87th Precinct detective division are under pressure to find the killer before he strikes again.

One of the most striking features about this series is how realistically the procedural part of the police procedural genre is portrayed. McBain does nothing to glamorize or demonize his dogged detectives, and he regularly mires them in tedious grunt work and sends them chasing down dead ends. There's plenty of both in this entry, published in 1963. Still, it's McBain's lyrical musings that lift the series above its gritty foundations, such as this description of a widow identifying her husband's body:

While the attendant pulled out the drawer on its oiled rollers, she stood by silently and then looked silently into the face of her husband, and nodded only once. She had accepted the knowledge the moment Carella revealed it on the telephone. This now, this looking into the face of the man she had married when she was nineteen, the man she had loved since she was seventeen, the man for whom she had borne three children, the man she had seen through bad times and good, this now, this looking into the dead and sightless face of a man who was now a corpse on an oiled drawer in a mortuary, this was only routine. The heartache had started the moment Carella spoke the words to her, and the rest was only routine.

The plot, with its relentless piling up of dead bodies and lots of moving parts, doesn't allow for much in the way of new character development for the boys in the precinct, but McBain uses what he's given us in earlier novels to make them fully human in a way that policemen in mysteries sometimes are not. After a short run of somewhat lackluster or dated books, this one sets the series firmly on solid ground once more. I'm eager to read what comes next. ( )

There's a sniper on the loose in the city, and it's up to the squad of the 87th precinct to figure out if there's a common thread connecting the victims, or if it's just a lunatic killing people at random.

Ten Plus One - you'll have to wait until the end to figure out what the title means - is an 87th Precinct novel on par with Give the Boys a Great Big Hand, as Carella and gang try to piece together a shared motive for the seemingly random sniper killings happening across the city, a job not made easier when they begin to discover that the motive for the shootings might be tied to past events that potential victims might not be willing to disclose, even in the face of death. Also of special note is the first appearance of Cynthia Forrest, who has a rather disastrous run-in with Bert Kling - still abrasive and angry after the death of his fiance back in Lady Lady, I Did It! - when she walks in asking for Carella in a way reminiscent of the nitro-toting villain of Killer's Wedge.

This is a straightforward precinct caper without any overly dubious red herrings or miscommunication that riddle some of the other entries in the series. If I have any overall complaints regarding this book in the series, I would say that seventeen books in, I'm officially tired of McBain anthropomorphizing the weather and waxing philosophical about the season. We get it already. It's spring. Other than that, great read. ( )