Ed McBain: Jack and the Beanstalk (USA 2012)

From the Publisher:
Jack McKinney is a bright-eyed twenty-year-old in the business of buying a snapbean farm with forty grand in cash, and attorney Matthew Hope assists with the deal -- until Jack's found dead in his condo, stabbed fourteen times.

The backwoods seller wants his forty grand pronto, but nobody can find the cash. And when Matthew pays a visit to the McKinney ranch, he gets more than he bargained for. Jack's mother, Veronica, is a woman who looks half her years, with cool gray eyes to match her ambivalent attitude toward her son's death. The only thing more dangerous than Veronica is daughter Sunny, the mirror image of her mother and a girl who can hold her liquor. Everyone seems to have a theory about the missing money, but Matthew's the only one who can get to the bottom of the bum deal.

The fourth installment of Ed McBain's Matthew Hope Mysteries, Jack and the Beanstalk delivers our lawyer into a world of seedy folks, sour deals, and a family gone afoul.

Ed McBain: Jack and the Beanstalk. A Matthew Hope Mystery. Thomas & Mercer, ISBN: 9781612181943 (October, 2012), 286 p., $13.95.

Ed McBain: Jack & the Beanstalk (USA 1994)

From the Publisher:
GIANT KILLER
Attorney Matthew Hope was feeling his age. But he was feeling better than Jack McKinney. Young Jack was dead, murdered just before completing a land deal in southwest Florida. Trying to unravel the man's estate, Hope climbed into the middle of a murder investigation and came face-to-face with both Jack's sexually provocative younger sister and even more beautiful 57-year-old mother. Before Hope could untangle the land deal, the other party to the transaction was murdered, and in a matter of days so was one of the two McKinney beauties. Suddenly, Matthew Hope was in the middle of a killing spree-one that all began when an adventurous young man named Jack planted a fatal seed...

"THE MATTHEW HOPE NOVELS DO FOR THE WORLD OF FLORIDA SLEAZE WHAT THE 87TH PRECINCT BOOKS DO FOR BIG-CITY VICE. THE READER IS HOOKED AND GIVEN NOT A MOMENT'S LETUP." -- New York Times Book Review

Ed McBain: Jack & the Beanstalk. Warner Books, ISBN: 0446601322 (October, 1994), 245 p., $5.99.

Ed McBain: Jack & the Beanstalk (USA 1985)

From the Publisher:
August in West Florida, a little bit of hell on earth. Jack McKinney, looking barely old enough to shave, stood in the swelter of Matthew Hope's Calusa County law office, spilling out a wide-eyed tale about wanting to buy a snap-bean farm. And he had the down payment to prove it. Four thousand in cash.

Now Jack's dead, stabbed fourteen times, and thirty-six thousand's missing. In cash. Matthew's questions are turning up some long-buried pasts, a second dead body, and some beautiful suspects. Like Sunny, Jack's sister, a surfer boy's fantasy, a delicious girl with some unsavory secrets. Or Veronica, a grown man's dream, a tough and lovely cattle rancher who's strangely unmoved by her son's death. Florida's getting hotter by deadly degrees, as Matthew bets it all against a scared killer with nothing left to lose...

Ed McBain: Jack & the Beanstalk. Pinnacle Books, ISBN: 0523425597 (December, 1985), 278 p., $3.50.

Ed McBain: Jack & the Beanstalk (USA 1984)

From the Publisher:
Jack McKinney's mother thought he was a tennis bum. His sister thought he was a cattle rustler. And McKinney himself thought he was going to tum a bankrupt snapbean farm into a paying operation. Never mind that in the sandy soil of Florida's West Coast, snapbeans were not a cash crop.

So on a steamy August Friday, the unemployed twenty-year-old slapped down a 54,000 deposit on the farm, refused financing on the remaining 536,000 purchase price, which he promised to hand over in cash at the closing and instructed attorney Matthew Hope to push the deal through before the owner could change his mind.

Four days later, McKinney was dead -- stabbed fourteen times, his plush condo apartment ransacked. And there was no trace of the $36,000.

As Matthew Hope is drawn deeper into the dead boy's affairs, he runs into a far-from-grieving mother, a sexually provoking sister and her punk boyfriend, a New Orleans whore with a steel-trap mind and a sudden windfall -- and more murder. He also runs up against the complexities of a love affair with a beautiful and passionate woman who happens to be nearly twenty years his senior.

A taut, fast-paced tale of duplicity and greed. Jack and the Beanstalk is Ed Me Bain in top form.

Ed McBain: Jack & the Beanstalk. A Matthew Hope Novel. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ISBN: 0030621976 (April, 1984), 250 p., $14.95.