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    Ax
    Ax
    Ax
    Audiobook5 hours

    Ax

    Written by Ed McBain

    Narrated by Dick Hill

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Eighty-six-year-old George Lasser was the superintendent of a building in the 87th Precinct until just recently. Unfortunately his tenure ended in the building’s basement with a sharp, heavy blade of an ax in his head…

    There are no witnesses, no suspects, and no clues. The wife and son? They’re both a little off-kilter, but they have alibis. Just when Carella and Hawes are about to put the case on the shelf, the killer strikes again. Now the detectives are hot on the trail of a man crazy enough to murder with an ax.

    One of the 87th Precinct series’ finest installments, Ax is a sharp, intense crime thriller that is classic Ed McBain. The New York Times hails it as “the best of today’s police stories—lively, inventive, convincing, suspenseful, and wholly satisfactory.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJun 26, 2012
    ISBN9781455873623
    Ax
    Author

    Ed McBain

    Ed McBain has been the recipient of the Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America. His 87th Precinct novels are international bestsellers. He lives in Connecticut.

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    Reviews for Ax

    3.5/5

    56 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A great series hits the doldrums. Short on plot and character development.
    • 4/5
      A very graphic and gruesome beginning. A man is found murdered with an ax buried in his skull. Hence the title. And the opening nastiness. “To tell the truth, it was all pretty goddamn gory.”A good story, with a quick pace and interesting characters! Carella and Hawes are the main detectives in this one, and they meet a lot of dead ends, no pun intended! By the way, what does rhyme with April?
    • 5/5
      The eighteenth installment of the 87th Precinct, AX is a straight-forward whodunit focusing on Carella and Cotton as they try to figure out why anyone would want to take an ax to an elderly janitor. Plenty of hostile interviews, dead ends, and much to Carella's chagrin, mothers. McBain's attention to the struggles and pitfalls of methodical police work is one of his strong points, and Ax is a perfect example of this.An interesting angle to this story is how investigating the murder of an individual can dredge up all kinds of past secrets, whether or not they eventually have anything to do with the crime, and how this can complicate an already difficult investigation.Danny the Gimp plays a role in this investigation (But why is he afraid of revolving doors?), and Carella appears to have finally disembarked from the emotional roller-coaster he was on for the last few novels.
    • 4/5
      Simple, bare bones detecting around a brutal crime with the most banal of motives. These books are mini masterpieces.
    • 4/5
      The 18th entry in McBain's classic long-running police procedural series about the 87th Precinct, located in a fictional New York City. In this 1960s entry, our detectives are called to the basement of a tenement where the building superintendent has been found with an ax buried in his skull. It seems like an extreme crime against an 86-year-old man who is not known for vice, but the investigation turns up some oddities, like a schizophrenic wife and an agoraphobic grown son. The mystery deepens when the beat cop turns up dead in the same basement.This is a solid entry in the series. The central crime is interesting, the suspect list pleasingly varied, and the red herrings convincing. The reflexive assumption that the murder was committed by an oversized black man who happens to be on the scene is quashed early and easily, a rarity in books of this time period.Unlike other 87th books, there's not a lot of time spent with the detectives off duty, although Steve Carella's lovely wife Teddy makes a welcome appearance. One of the things I like about this series is that McBain gives us enough personal info on his detectives to make us care about them, but he's not a one-note writer. Some books we get a lot of personal exposition; some books hardly any. It keeps everything feeling fresh and unpredictable. And unlike some series where the characterization is stronger than the plotting, McBain generally has a good mix of the two.