Ed McBain: Ghosts (USA 2012)

From the Publisher:
A young woman stops at the grocery store after work, but she never makes it home -- at least not all the way. She is stabbed to death in front of her building, her groceries strewn across the cold pavement. Upstairs her neighbor and popular ghost story author Gregory Craig lay dead as well, stabbed in his apartment. When Craig's publisher is found murdered just days later, Detective Steve Carella has a deadly mystery on his hands, one unlike any he's ever had before.

Searching for clues, Carella instead finds Craig's girlfriend, a medium whose spooky predictions keep him guessing. When some leads take him to a "haunted" house on the New England shores, strange events turn even stranger... until, back in the city, he turns up the crucial evidence he needs to track down the killer.

A rare twist in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series, Ghosts weaves the haunting uneasiness of the supernatural thriller with a classic, tightly plotted police procedural. Stephen King hails Ghosts as "excellent. It's a fine -- and creepy -- mystery, and a fine novel."

Ed McBain: Ghosts. A Novel of the 87th Precinct. Thomas & Mercer / Amazon Publ., ISBN: 9781612181615 (March, 2012), 230 p., $13.95.

Ed McBain: Ghosts (USA 1981)

From the Publisher:
GHOSTS CAN BE DEADLY
Christmas snow falls on the woman's body as an ugly puddle of red forms on the frozen sidewalk. A twisted clothes hanger binds the wrists of a second victim, a writer found viciously slashed in an apartment upstairs. Detective Steve Carella says the murders are connected. But his best clues come from a professional medium, who gets her messages from auras. And from the writer's ex-wife, who's been dead for three years. The cops at the 87th Precinct go all out to catch a killer made of flesh and blood. Until something leads them to the water's edge... until somedthing in a deserted summer cottage leads to murder... something horrible enough to make your skin crawl.

Ed McBain: Ghosts. A Novel of the 87th Precinct. Bantam Books, ISBN: 0553145185 (May, 1981), 230 p., $2.25.

Ed McBain: Ghosts (USA 1980)

From the Publisher:
"'There was, from the beginning, a palpable sense of something alien in the house.'"
Detective Steve Carella finds these words in the typewriter of Gregory Craig, famous author of tales of the supernatural. He has already discovered Mr. Craig's body in an adjoining bedroom, his face and torso punctuated by stab wounds. This is the second corpse that Carella and his partner, Cotton Hawes, have found in the space of thirty minutes -- the first just outside the building in which they are now standing. The detectives are inclined to believe that the two murders are somehow connected; what Carella cannot know is that the sentence he is reading, assumed to be the beginning of Craig's new novel, will shortly come screaming to life.

For as the investigation proceeds, Carella finds himself inextricably involved in a line of inquiry unlike any other he has ever pursued when he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Hillary Scott, Craig's lover. At first Carella is drawn to her because of her eerie resemblance to his own great love, his wife, Teddy. But his fascination with Hillary grows as she takes him in directions that neither his intellect nor his heart can accept. And when the clues that she seems to pull out of thin air prove to be uncannily accurate, he is thrust into an investigation that is as bizarre as most cases are routine, one that will ultimately lead him to an extraordinary confrontation in a deserted Massachusetts summer cottage and the frightening world of the occult.

Ghosts is Ed McBain at his very best, and whether he is writing about the familiar world of Isola and the 87th precinct, or about events that would not be believed in any world, he is nothing less than heart-stoppingly terrific.

Ed McBain: Ghosts. A Novel. Viking Press, ISBN: 0670338060 (May, 1980), 212 p., $9.95.