Why would any man, however deranged, take an overdose of sleeping pills and then calmly turn

off

his air conditioner with the city sweltering through a backbreaking heat wave? This question nags at Detectives Bert Kling and Steve Carella. Kling’s got other problems: his startlingly beautiful wife is

almost

certainly cheating on him, and he is being stalked by a psychopathic ex-con bent on getting Wing for having sent him up. While Carella scratches away like a terrier at the “suicide,” Kling grows less and less capable of coping.

In a shattering triple climax, the tinderbox elements converge Ed McBain makes it clear that there can be no real winners here, except for the reader.

In this, his thirty-fifth 87th Precinct novel, Ed McBain reaffirms his mastery of the police procedural story.