The pusher Book

On a bitterly cold night a police patrolman finds a young Hispanic drug dealer dead in a basement apartment. There's a rope around the boy's neck, tied to the bars over the window. There's also a used syringe on the table next to the body. It's such a miserable effort to disguise a murder as a suicide that Steve Carella and the other detectives of the 87th Precinct can't even figure out why someone made the effort, especially when it becomes clear that the victim actually died of an overdose.

Any number of people might have wanted the pusher dead, including the new dealer who takes over his territory. But then other people begin dying and an anonymous caller informs Carella's boss, Lt. Pete Burns, that the fingerprints on the syringe discovered next to the body belong to no one other than the Lieutenant's own son.

This is a pretty good, if very dated, book in Ed McBain's long-running 87th Precinct series. It's a good mystery and its fun to watch Carella and the other detectives work through the investigation. This is also a very interesting book in the series because of something that McBain reveals in the afterward. Fans of the series will be sure to want to read it.