Reviews for Hark!

The average rating for Hark! based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-06-05 00:00:00 Michael Brummet The penultimate book in this long-running series is something of a disappointment. A clever career criminal named the Deaf Man, who has been bedeviling the detectives of the 87th Precinct for a very long time, returns to taunt them again. After killing a woman who had previously betrayed him, the Deaf Man begins sending a large number of cryptic messages to Detective Steve Carella who has been his principal nemesis through the years. The messages are mostly quotations from the plays of William Shakespeare and some of them are coded in a variety of ways. The detectives correctly interpret the first of the messages as a confession of the murder that the Deaf Man has committed, but the rest of them are beyond confusing. Carella and the other detectives assume that the Deaf Man is taunting them with the plans of an upcoming crime, and in the past, he's planned and executed some huge plots. But will the detectives be able to decipher the clues in time to disrupt their adversary's plans? It's an interesting plot, at least initially. But it runs on and on and on as the deaf Man sends message after message after message, and by the time the reader is halfway through the book (well, this reader at least), you're screaming for McBain to get the hell on with things. Then, by the time the great caper is revealed it's more than a little anticlimactic and you're thinking, "Wow, I came all the way through this book just for this?" The more interesting parts of the book involve stories of the personal lives of the characters that have been running on for the last few books in the series. Fat Ollie Weeks is still looking for his stolen novel; Steve Carella is still depressed about the upcoming double wedding of his mother and his sister, especially now that he's paying for it, and a couple of the other detectives are experiencing problems in their relationships. These diversions are fun and often very amusing, but the rest of the book really doesn't measure up to the high standards that McBain had established earlier. It's as though he came up with a clever idea and then got too carried away with it. This isn't a bad book, but it's certainly not one of his best.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-21 00:00:00 Carlos Leyequien I recently reviewed Cop Hater the first of the 87th Precinct novels. Hark! is the author's penultimate effort. I was interested in how it would compare to his early work. Why is this something that would appeal to me? Let me quote from a review of Cop Hater by my GR friend Bobby Underwood. "Gritty, lean, and at times surprisingly romantic, the first entry in the 87th Precinct series remains one of the best…It seems old-hat today, tagging along with Carella, Kling, Meyer Meyer, Hawes and the rest of the 87th Precinct cops as they tried to solve multiple crimes so they could make it home to their sweethearts or go find one, but when Cop Hater was written, it stood alone as something unique. Despite it being imitated over the decades in various ways by a lot of authors, some of them very good in their own right, it still does. Reading it now, it needs to be judged within that context, and when it is, it shines." There is a lot in Hark! of what I liked in Cop Hater: the multiple storylines; the dynamics of the 87th personalities; the mixture of the urgent and mundane. Yet, this effort comes up a bit short. Except for a few references to contemporary celebrities and events, it still has a 1950s vibe even though it was written in the 21st century. The central plot involves a familiar criminal, The Deaf Man, and he is again intent on making life miserable for the precinct's detectives while showing what a brilliant mind he possesses. McBain has put a lot of work into this aspect of the plot, but it didn't connect with me the way some of his other books did. Some of the other subplots worked well. Ollie Weeks shows up for a nice turn. Cotton Hawes has a lot to think about as he dodges a sniper's bullets. But, Carella's thoughts about the impending second marriages of his mother and sister are awkward at best and poorly developed at worst. Am I a grumpy old man? Or just an old dog, now less amused by another old dog's usual bag of tricks?