![]() ![]() The bullet-riddled corpse of the business partner, Dom Archese, lies in a back room, and on a nearby wall someone (Archese, presumably) has scribbled the letters “JB” in chalk. ![]() When Cordell and Bridges arrive at the shop to look for signs of petty larceny, however, what they find is a grand case of homicide. The friend, Johnny Bridges, runs a tailor and dry-cleaning shop uptown, and he suspects his business partner of pilfering cash from the store till. One day, a boyhood chum of Cordell’s travels to that spot to ask for his help. Then a chain of circumstances (a cheating wife, a spasm of violence, a public scandal) led him to a spot-the little square outside the Cooper Union building, in lower Manhattan-where he panhandles for booze money and watches the world pass him by. ![]() ![]() Not so long ago, Matt Cordell ran his own investigation firm. Well before the detective-as-alcoholic-loner became a hardened cliché, before the ranks of fictional sleuthdom began to teem with down-on-their-luck protagonists who carry a bottle in their pocket and a backstory-sized chip on their shoulder, McBain turned out this stand-alone novel about a disgraced private eye who gets a chance at redemption. ![]()
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