Lady, Lady, I Did It!
4/5
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About this audiobook
The only person Detective Bert Kling cares about in this world is his fiancée, Claire Townsend. And when her body is found slain at the infamous “bookstore massacre,” Bert and every detective in the precinct is determined to get the man responsible. To do so, they’re going to have to figure out the connection between a junkie, a professor, a bookstore owner, and the beautiful fiancée of a cop. When they do, there will be nowhere for the killer to hide.
A devastating look at the personal side of a hardened detective, Lady, Lady, I Did It! is a gut-wrenching addition to Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, and it paints in sharp relief the squadroom’s familial bonds and the price paid for violating its sanctity.
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 Lady, Lady, I Did It!
56 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A dark and somewhat mean spirited entry in this classic series.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5*Possible Spoilers*After a brief time off, McBain is back to involving the boys of the 87th directly with the crimes they are investigating. In this case it isn't Carella's family for a change, but instead Bert Kling's girlfriend Claire Townsend, who is found dead on the scene of a mass shooting at a local bookstore. Claire's death makes it personal not only for Kling, but for his extended family of the 87th, and the boys scramble to track down the mysterious gunman with only one clue, the final word spoken by one of the victims: Carpenter.Besides the direct involvement of a member of the 87th, which allows McBain more leeway into examining the emotional disposition of the main characters, the bulk of this novel is the same procedural rundown as previous novels, with plenty of interviews and false leads - and don't be surprised if that final clue isn't exactly what it appears to be.One minor drawback to this installment is that McBain feels the need to take us back to previous moments between Kling and Claire, and the numerous flashbacks, while not especially ponderous, do slow down the novel a bit, and have no purpose other than to demonstrate how broken-up Kling is over her death. It doesn't hurt the novel, but it doesn't really accomplish much.With the earlier novels in the 87th series well over half a century old, it is interesting to look back at how certain subject matters are handled in McBains older novels. McBain was rather progressive for the time these books were written, and he doesn't always take a clear black-and-white Dragnet approach to crime. In this case, abortion plays a small roll in the proceedings, and while some of the terminology ("criminal abortion") and treatment might bother some modern pro-choice readers, McBain makes sure to muddy the waters by throwing an underage rape victim into the mix and have Carella seem to waver afterwards about the practicality of the law. This actually kicks off a trend with Carella in the series - while previous installments saw Carella becoming increasingly agitated and explosively verbal, with this novel he seems to become more reflective and philosophical, becoming more sensitive to the human drama unfolding within the crimes they investigate. With Carella witnessing both the death of Frankie Hernandez and Parker's flat-out assassination of Pepe Mirandez at the end of See Them Die, Claire's death and it's effect on Kling have apparently broken through his tough cop exterior. This softer Carella (at least emotionally) will serve to play a sharp contrast to Kling's growing abrasiveness in later Precinct novels.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Who in the heck shoots up a bookstore? Mamma mia!This book begins with a tragedy for the 87th, especially for its youngest detective, Bert Kling. And, “Every other cop in the precinct knew that he was a part of the club, and you didn’t go around hurting club members or the people they loved.”Everyone helps to solve this one for Kling, and when they do, no one is prepared for what they discover. It's a good story, a bit more personal than the others in the series that I've read so far. Poor Bert.Patterns.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kling's fiancee, Claire Townsend, is killed in a violent bookstore shooting that leaves a total of 4 people dead. The boys in the 87th have to figure out who the shooter was after in order to solve the crime. At first it looks like it might have been Claire, since she had recently helped a girl obtain an illegal abortion (this was in 1960) and the girl later died from infection from the surgery. Turns out that the killer was after someone else in the bookstore: a man who had argued with him over the $25 paint job on his car. Four people brutally murdered for a lousy paint job. You can see the cynicism coming through. Hell, even I felt cynical reading it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 14th entry in McBain's storied 87th Precinct series finds the detectives investigating a mass shooting at a bookstore where four people are killed by an assailant who escapes. Once the squad rules out the idea that it was a random act of violence they begin to dig into the backgrounds of the victims, searching for a possible motive. Complicating the investigation is the news that one of the victims is the fiancée of Detective Bert Kling. Could she have been the killer's real target?The strengths of the 87th Precinct novels for me are the characterization that makes each detective a real person with a life outside the squadroom, and the meticulous recounting of the day-to-day detective work that is decidedly unglamorous but ends with an arrest nearly every time. We've met Kling's fiancée in earlier books, so the violence here has the capacity to shock us nearly as much as Kling and his colleagues. The motive, when the killer is finally collared, is depressingly but realistically mundane, another taste of real life in the pages of a novel.