As a cop with the city’s famed 87th Precinct, Steve Carella has seen it all. Or so he thinks. Because nothing can prepare him for the sight that greets him on a sweltering July night: fellow detective Mike Reardon’s dead body splayed across the sidewalk, his face blown away by a .45.

Days later, Reardon’s partner is found dead, a .45-caliber bullet buried deep in his chest. Only a fool would call it a coincidence, and Carella’s no fool. He chalks the whole ugly mess up to a grudge killing…until a third murder shoots that theory to hell. Armed with only a single clue, Carella delves deep into the city’s underbelly, launching a grim search for answers that will lead him from a notorious brothel to the lair of a beautiful, dangerous widow. He won’t stop until he finds the truth—or until the next bullet finds him.

The debut novel from EdMcBain’s gritty 87th Precinct series, Cop Hater was hailed by the New York Times as “the best of today's procedural school of police stories—lively, inventive, convincing, suspenseful, and wholly satisfactory.”

A bitterly cold night offers up a body turned blue—not frozen, but swinging from a rope in a dank basement. The dead teen seems like a clear case of suicide, but Detective Steve Carella and Lieutenant Peter Byrnes find a few facts out of place, and an autopsy confirms their suspicions. The boy hadn’t hung himself but OD’d on heroin before an unknown companion strung him up to hide the true cause of death. The revelation dredges up enough muck to muddy the waters of what should’ve been an open-and-shut case. To find the answers to a life gone off the rails, Carella and Byrnes face a deep slog into the community of users and pushers—but a grim phone calls discloses that very community already has its claws in a cop’s son. A new pusher is staking a claim right under the 87th Precinct’s noses, and it’s up to Carella and Byrnes to snag the viper before it poisons their whole lives.

It’s like an old-time gangster movie: a speeding car, a blazing gun…and suddenly a guy walking down the street without a care in the world is lying in the gutter without a head on his shoulders. But who pulled the high-powered trigger that turned Sy Kramer from a blackmailer into a chalk outline? Was it the politician’s wife with a pornographic past? The soda-pop tycoon desperate to keep a business-busting bungle bottled up? Or was it whoever was paying Kramer a small fortune to hide what must’ve been one very big bad? It falls to detectives Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes of the 87th Precinct to pound the pavement of the city and beat the bushes of the backwoods for the suspect with the best motive, the most blistering weapon, and the biggest set of brass ones. En route, they’ll meet pretty ladies and petty lowlifes, great white hunters and gray flannel ad execs, and, when the going gets rough, maybe even their match. It’s all in several long days’—and even longer nights’—work for the guys who make their living behind the badge, and under the gun.

From the internationally admired creator of the 87TH Precinct series come these tales featuring policemen and their work and displaying Ed McBain’s inimitable talents in shorter form. . . .

In this collection of short stories, bestselling author Ed McBain presents a varied and colorful cast of characters who run afoul of, then into, the arms of the law. . . .

A collector who loves his porcelain more than his daughter; a hooker who melts the heart of a tough cop; an ex-fighter who goes berserk at Christmas; an automobile dealer out for a funny business ride. . . .

Ed McBain’s bestselling works put him in the very top rank of crime writers. In The McBain Brief, he more than justifies his reputation as a master storyteller.