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When a novelist has been plying his trade for more than one-half century, it may be difficult for a book reviewer to find new language to describe the author's latest endeavor. Ed McBain, who also writes under his true name of Evan Hunter, has been producing a wide range of literary efforts since the publication of his first bestselling novel, THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, in 1954. One cannot even catalogue the efforts of this prolific writer, which have included upwards of fifty 87th Precinct police procedurals, the Matthew Hope series, and a long list of novels covering a wide range of subjects. Along the way McBain has been honored by mystery writing organizations in England and America. He truly is a legend of American writing.
ALICE IN JEOPARDY is McBain's latest mystery effort, a book that offers readers some new and different elements of style and plot while maintaining many of the tried and true essentials that make his novels such a quality reading adventure.
For Alice Glendenning, the heroine of ALICE IN JEOPARDY, life has been a recent string of calamities. Eight months earlier her husband, Eddie, was lost at sea in a boating accident. The accident had occurred shortly after the Glendenning family had moved to Florida in an attempt to reinvigorate Eddie's flagging investment career. Now widowed and the mother of two young children, Alice desperately needs the infusion of insurance policy proceeds to keep her precarious financial state from collapsing. She has taken a job as a real estate agent but has yet to make her first sale. To top off her troubles, on her way home from work, a traffic accident puts her leg in a cast and makes work almost impossible. Then, for reasons that Alice cannot fathom, her children, Ashley and Jamie, are kidnapped and ransom demands are made. Quite a bit going on, and we just finished chapter one.
There is an entertaining irony in the law enforcement response to the report of the kidnapping. McBain has spent the greater part of his writing life introducing readers to police officers who are quietly competent crime fighters, solving mysteries with deep thought and hard work. McBain's cops are not flashy superheroes; they are just lunch-pail working men and women. But the law enforcement crews appearing in ALICE IN JEOPARDY are nothing more than keystone cops in their incompetence and clumsiness. Three different police agencies become involved in attempting to locate Alice's children. All of them appear to be interested in the publicity and glory of a high-profile arrest. None of them seem to care about the most important thing in the world to Alice, her children.
While McBain takes great and humorous delight in skewering the bumbling efforts of the Florida law enforcement officials involved in Alice's case, there is still a kidnapping to be successfully solved. All of the characters introduced to the reader in the opening pages of the novel reappear in some important fashion to help resolve the escapade that serves as the underpinning of ALICE IN JEOPARDY. Throughout the adventure readers will find comfort in the classic ingredients of an Ed McBain mystery: real people confronting real problems in a real manner with wit and wisdom as detailed by an experienced and renowned author.
For fifty years readers have come to expect enjoyable, quality writing from a long and treasured list of novels. The years have not dulled Ed McBain's talent.
--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman
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