1958 police procedural, seventh in the 87th Precinct series. The
87th gets a note: "I will kill the lady tonight at 8. What can you do
about it?"
By this point the main characters have been established, and
there's not much for the new reader to have to pick up anyway (though
we get quick reminders of who everyone is). So mostly it's a puzzle:
who might "the lady" be? Who wants her dead? Indeed, do they really
care about that, or are they just doing it to make the police fuss, or
indeed do they want to be caught?
Well, no answers to that here of course: this is simple writing for
simple men, with lots of beautiful sexy women for the lead detective
to leer over—and a prostitute whose schtick is a claimed descent from
Italian nobility and having to be forced to do the job (nobody seems
to regard it as in any way worthy of comment that the allure of
committing rape makes her the most popular prostitute in the city).
The basic problem here is that I don't really like any of these
people, cops or witnesses or victims. In what I assume is an effort to
be "gritty", nobody here is at all pleasant, and all I have left for
them is my basic desire for any human not to suffer.
Apparently this was inflated with lots of padding from a
novella-length idea in nine days to meet a deadline, and while I
didn't know that while I was reading it I'm not at all surprised.
I am told that the series gets better.