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    Eight Black Horses
    Eight Black Horses
    Eight Black Horses
    Audiobook8 hours

    Eight Black Horses

    Written by Ed McBain

    Narrated by Dick Hill

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Finding a dead body was not unusual for an autumn night in the 87th Precinct. But this young woman’s body was naked—and potentially related to the series of odd missives received at the station house. All signs point to the Deaf Man’s return, this time with a plot more diabolical than even the jaded policemen could imagine. He’s been sending them mysterious pictures of police equipment: nightsticks, helmets, black horses, and more. But what did they mean?

    Detective Steve Carella would be one of the first to find out, but only after he discovered that the Deaf Man was impersonating him, which leads to more violence. Now, Carella and his fellow officers must face down the Deaf Man in a lethal confrontation: a confrontation more surprising, shocking, and explosive than anything the cops of the 87th Precinct have ever experienced.

    Eight Black Horses is an inventive, tightly woven 87th Precinct novel—and it’s Ed McBain at his incomparable best.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMar 24, 2015
    ISBN9781501252426
    Eight Black Horses
    Author

    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 Eight Black Horses

    3.5/5

    69 ratings8 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is the second 87th precinct novel I've read - I started with and loved the Pusher, the third in the long series - and I didn't find Eight Black Horses as compelling. Perhaps for readers working their way through the series, this would come as a treat, a novel featuring a previous villain who returns to plague the detectives during the already stressful holiday season, yielding a series of character sketches. But the novel is relatively light on detection; the most interesting parts of the mystery solve themselves. I also enjoyed this story less because the writing seemed more cynical. In the Pusher, the author tells the story in a way that suggests compassion for the story's victims, even for victims who contribute to their own destruction. In Eight Black Horses, characters who will later die are presented from the outset as too shallow, or venal, to live - or they're simply not developed. Perhaps that's a conscious stylistic choice, intended to make the bad guy's unfolding plan credible to the series reader by signaling that the author is feeling sufficiently callous that in this book, he just might kill off several of his long-running characters. Or perhaps, by this point in the series, McBain simply wrote differently. I like the earlier tone better.
    • 4/5
      “The Deaf Man arrived, and suddenly the circus was back in town.” And I’m back for the Deaf Man vs. the 87th Precinct - Part 4! And I'm also back for the writing, like the first sentence in the book, "The lady was extraordinarily naked." and this line, "Mean, though, still as mean as a hooker's snatch." … Right? Raw, descriptive, and enjoyably unique!This was a fun read, good crisp writing, and quickly devoured by me! Set against the 12 days of Christmas, the Deaf Man sends cryptic clues to the 87th in advance of his latest criminal escapade. And they attempt to defeat him. And so it goes...4 good reads in a row with this lineup, and I'm looking forward to the last two!
    • 4/5
      Steve Carella and Arthur Brown catch the murder of young white woman found in a park naked and with a bullet wound in her neck. Meanwhile, the Deaf Man has come back into their lives by sending in the mail sheets of paper of police items such as badges, hats, batons and guns plus horses. As they stew over what these hints to a big crime might mean, another woman is killed . Are the murders and Deaf Man's plans connected?Meanwhile, the Deaf Man is planning a big robbery plus an even bigger coup against Carella and the 87th which decimate their numbers.
    • 4/5
      I’ve read a lot of Ed McBain and since the special Kindle sale a while back that offered some 40 of his titles for .99 each, I know have a lot more to read. Not in any order.

      I have often wondered about McBain’s (nee Evan Hunter) sexual experience. If you’ve read Candyland, for example, his familiarity with massage parlors struck me as coming from personal experience. Then again, his portrayal of police procedures seem quite real, also. Nevertheless, the Deaf Man’s libidic (probably not a word, but I like it) prowess in this book with a woman he has designs upon, made me a little uncomfortable. It shouldn’t have, and I hope I’ve not getting Victorian in my dotage.

      Never has Isola’s characteristics been so prominently displayed. And it so resembles New York. “The center of the city, Isola, was an island; hence its name: isola means “island” in Italian. In actual practice the entire city was referred to as Isola, even though the other four sections were separately and more imaginatively named. Riverhead came from the Dutch, though not directly. The land up there had once been owned by a patroon named Ryerhurt, and it had been called Ryerhurt’s Farms, which eventually became abbreviated and bastardized to Riverhead. No one knew why...”

      I really like McBain, but the ones which feature the Deaf Man are my least favorite. His personal animus toward Carella and brilliance seem phantasmagorical. The personal animus displayed by a criminal toward a policeman always seems very artificial, although to McBain’s credit, the Deaf Man manipulates the police department into becoming part of his schemes. “At first Carella had supposed this to be evidence of a monumental ego, but he had come to learn that the Deaf Man used the police as a sort of second pickup gang, larger than the nucleus group, but equally essential to the successful commission of the crime. That he had been thwarted on three previous occasions was entirely due to chance. He was smarter than the police, and he used the police, and he let the police know they were being used.”
    • 4/5
      It all got terribly confusing when the Deaf Man put in an appearance and the criminal mastermind is making his presence known by the dead bodies that are turning up around Isola. Then there are the notes - with cryptic patterns including eight black horses dancing across a page - that look like they mean nothing. But Detectives Kling, Carella, and Meyer know that with the Deaf Man, the seemingly meaningless always means something.
    • 4/5
      Just started re-reading the 87th precinct series (out of order) and this is a great one to start with. A great inventive plot and a wonderful finish with elements of drama, black humour and violence all stirred in.
    • 4/5
      It's Christmas and the Deaf Man returns. He is again sucessfully playing games with the 87th precinct policmen, especially the one he sees as his nemisis, Steve Carella. The letters he is sending to the 87th Precinct are his way of showing them how much smarter than them he is. In so many books this always leads to the detectives out smarting the criminal and everyone lives happily everafter. But not so at the 87th Precinct, it is fate - dumb luck that thwarts Deaf Man.So that as a police prodedural, this book falls way short of so many other great 87th Precinct books. But as an entertaining story, not many of the 87th Precinct books can match this one. There is a rant about Christmas that Detective Parker does in chapter 9 that puts the "bah humbug" back into Christmas in a way that would warm the heart of even old Scrooge. There is also an Abbott and Costello "Who's On First" routine between Genero and Ms. Byrnes in Chapter 13 that would not fit into most of the 87th Precinct books but fits in really well in this one. The love between Carella and his wife, Teddy is also nicely done. Not all the touches are as well done (the pictures Deaf Man sends are easily identified as the 12 days of Christmas for the reader but takes the detectives most of the book to figure out), so that the police procedural elements that are always done so well definitely take a back seat in this book. But Eight Black Horses is still a very strong entry in this series.
    • 5/5
      Two nightsticks, three pairs of handcuffs, four police hats, five walkie-talkies, six police shields, seven Wanted posters, eight black horses....where will it all end, and how? Christmas is coming to the 87th Precinct.