ericwelch's review
5.0
Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle) and Ed McBain (The 87th Precinct police procedurals) are one and the same, so it’s perhaps unusual that the two would collaborate on this compulsive novel of obsession. Writing as Hunter (his real name) the first part follows Benjamin Thorpe, a successful Los Angeles architect in New York for an opening. Thorpe has a problem. He’s obsessed with sex (a warning to those who can’t handle it – the novel gets graphic — now that remark should raise our circulation stats 50%), and he is determined to indulge his fantasies before he returns home to his wife in California. His usual contacts don’t pan out, nor does a woman he meets in the hotel bar, so he ends up in a massage parlor, where because of his drunkenness he can’t perform as he’d like, so when his time is up and he hasn’t been “completely satisfied,” he gets angry demanding more time. The manager throws him out and down the stairs where he is then mugged and robbed by two men on the street. McBain then takes over in the second part and we follow the investigation of Detective Emma Boyle of the Special Victims (read Rape) unit and her investigation partner from Homicide into the murder and rape of a young prostitute from the massage parlor where Ben Thorpe had spent the evening before catching his flight back to L.A. McBain/Hunter is a master at vividly conveying the ups and downs of a routine investigation – his series with Detective Steve Carpella of the 87th squad in a fictitious city called Insula, but clearly meant to be New York, are classics. The evidence begins to point to Ben Thorpe as the culprit. Every character in the book seems to have some sort of sexual hangup, but until the last couple of chapters when Emma finds some laundry back from the dry cleaners, the identity of the is murderer unclear. It’s an excellent read.
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