Word: mcbain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...DOLLAR COLLAPSED against the German mark and the Japanese yen last week, Sara McBain saw the impact for herself in a supermarket in Tokyo. The housewife, visiting from Chicago, stared in disbelief at cranberry juice that cost nearly $7 a quart at the going exchange rate, some four times as much as a similar bottle would sell for back home. A large box of Cheerios cost more than $12. But it was the meat counter, she says, that "really threw me for a loop." There she discovered roast beef for about $16 a quarter-pound. That made McBain wonder whether...
...McBain returns with another superb thriller...
...Shetland pony across the | slack wire above the center ring, you begin to wonder if you could do it blindfolded. Sure, easy. But if the pony were blindfolded? If you were both blindfolded and you were juggling live electric eels? Something like this may have gone through Ed McBain's mind as this master began There Was a Little Girl (Warner; 323 pages; $21.95), his 80th or maybe 160th crime novel. Could he, for instance, just to make things interesting, write a thriller in which his hero gets shot on the first page and stays unconscious for the entire book...
What is surprising is not that McBain pulls this off but that he does it without breaking a sweat. As always in his novels, sharp, clear sentences trot briskly one after another, tailing up into effective paragraphs and chapters as if there were nothing to it. As always, the funny stuff is funny and the scary parts scary. The puzzle is even puzzling: What did Florida lawyer Matthew Hope stumble over while trying to negotiate the sale of a fairgrounds to a local circus that got him shot? A few of Hope's friends try to find...
...more, telling him about the time in Rome when her hands were sticky with gelato and he washed them in a fountain. "Dad," she says, "could you just squeeze my hand a little? Just so I'll know you're hearing me? I'm not rushing you or anything ..." McBain gets the daughter right, of course, and the bears and the tigers right too, as he has done for dozens of books and years...