September, 2001
While many writers speak of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, leave it to that consummate pro, Ed McBain to get it exactly right. In McBain’s newest, Money, Money, Money (Simon & Schuster; $25.00; 269 pages) the detectives of the 87thPrecinct catch a case in which a woman’s body has been thrown into the lion’s cage at the Zoo. Grizzly sight; and not bad enough of itself; one of her legs has landed some distance away, giving the88th Precinct ( and Fat Ollie Weeks) jurisdiction over it.
The 87th's Steve Carella and Fat Ollie share the jurisdiction over the corpse. It is Christmas in the city, but it isn’t the giving season. A retired Gulf War pilot, a careless second-story man, a shady pair of Secret Service types are all in town, chasing a large amount of cash. Then there is a trash can stuffed with a book salesman carrying a P-38 Walther and a wad of big bills. The bills and the salesman lead Carella and Ollie to Wadsworth & Dodds, a respected small publisher, which is good news to Fat Ollie who is working on a police novel he’s sure will be a best seller.
Others looking for the cash stash include Nikmaddu Zazour, Mahmoud Gharib and Jassim, who looked like a pit viper. The world was expanding; no need for a bomb in the World Trade Center, when one could commit small acts of terror, such as leaving a small bomb in a movie. Or leaving a satchel under an orchestra seat at Clarendon Hall on the night Svi Cohen would be soloing, the Big Jew playing his accursed Zionist fiddle? Nikmaddu had himself worked with Osama binLaden on the Dhahran bombing attack in which nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed. All Nikmaddu wanted was nothing less than the withdrawal of all U. S. and western countries from Arab or Moslem countries and he had the funds to pursue this dream. And they’re off, all of them chasing the Money, Money, Money being supplied to make this state of affairs happen.
***
In the mountain town of South Lake Tahoe, Nevada, attorney Nina Reilly is noted for taking on the underdog cases. Which is why Jessie Potter, who has just won seven million dollars from a casino slot machine comes to Nina to formulate a plan whereby Jessie can collect the money without giving her true identity. Unfortunately all sorts of interests would like to part Jessie from her jackpot. The Gaming Commission thinks the jackpot was rigged. The man sitting in Jessie’s seat at the machine thinks the jackpot ought to be his, and is not above circumventing the law to get it.
And the wealthy man stalking Jessie has hired his own unscrupulous attorney to go up against Nina in court. Writ of Execution (Delacorte Press; $24.95;403 pages) by Perri O’Shaughnessy is about glittering casinos and taut courtroom drama and is the sixth Nina Reilly courtroom drama penned by sisters, lawyer Pamela O’Shaughnessy and film editor and writer Mary O’Shaughnessy.
***
He slips into their homes at night and walks silently into bedrooms where women lie sleeping, unaware of the horrors they will now endure. The precision of the killer’s methods suggest he is a deranged man of medicine. Boston newspapers have dubbed him The Surgeon. The cops only clue rests with another surgeon. Two years before Dr. Catherine Cordell fought back and killed her attacker before he could complete his assault. Now she is a top trauma doctor who hides her fears of intimacy beneath a cool, elegant exterior.
Though she agrees to help the police she is secretly chilled because with each new killing The Surgeon, as he is called, adds new details similar to Cordell’s own ordeal, cutting closer to her, from hospital to her home to a bone-chilling climax.
Tess Gerritsen left a successful practice in internal medicine to raise her children and concentrate on her writing, with such medical thrillers as this latest, The Surgeon (Ballantine Books; $24.95; 359 pages).
***
Park ranger Anna Pigeon is on a training assignment to study grizzly bears in Glacier National Peace Park in Blood Lure (Putnam;$24.95; 320 pages), Nevada Barr’s tenth adventure in a National Park. On her first night Anna and her trainer, Joan Rand, go out hiking in search of the bears. On the second night, the tables are turned and the bear comes searching for them. Daybreak finds a teenage boy missing, another camper dead, her neck snapped and the flesh of her face cutaway. Anna must now find the beast stalking the trails in this latest wilderness adventure.
***