Alice in Jeopardy : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Not McBain's best!
Review: The set-up for ALICE IN JEOPARDY should bother a critical reader. Foridian Alice Glendenning is a widowed real estate agent who is having trouble getting her insurance company to pay up on a $250,000 double indemnity claim after her husband is drowned in a boating accident. She's trying to start a new career as a real estate agent when someone kidnaps her children and demands the $250,000 as a ransom. About ten pages in, I knew who the culprit was and you should too.

McBain's characters should remind you of those in his 87th Precinct novels. There are two sets of bumbling cops, local Cape October police and the FBI. The locals cops won't take no for an answer when Alice tells them there has been no kidnapping. She believes the kidnapper when she tells Alice she'll kill the kids if she calls the police. Alice's housekeeper reports the crime anyway and stubbornly refuses to shut up about it. She's the one who brings in both sets of investigators. Throw in a curious real estate client, Alice's sister Carol and her truckdriver husband Rafe, and Alice's artist friend Charlie Hobbs and McBain has a lot of characters to keep track of. One of the plot lines, Rafe's search for the "funny money" the Cape October cops provide as ransom, turns out to be a dead end that McBain loses interest in.

There is quite a bit of suspense involving the accomplices, a black woman and a blonde but even that turns out to be totally unrealistic. An eye witness to the kidnapping misidentifies a man as a woman. Sorry. I don't think so.

Then there's the climax. It reads like something out of Murder She Wrote (not a compliment). As a matter of fact, this whole thing reads like a bad television show. You know you've seen it before, and you wonder why McBain bothered with it in the first place when his real passion is for his made-up city and the cool characters at the 87th.

Rating:
Summary: Alice in Jeopardy
Review: A bold departure for a true professional. I have been reading Ed McBain since 1972 and this one caught me off guard.
The characters are poorly done. You never get to know the children or much about them. Then McBain makes a 180 degree turn from the 87th to the police and FBI in this story, who are more like "The Keystone Cops". It's a different kind of novel, but the bottom line is that it works in the end.

Rating:
Summary: A misanthrope's delight.
Review: Alice Glendenning is having a bad life in "Alice in Jeopardy," by Ed McBain. Her husband, Eddie, accidentally drowned eight months earlier while sailing on his boat, leaving his wife with two young kids to support. Alice's son, Jamie, has not spoken a word since his father died. Since Eddie's body was never recovered, the life insurance company has so far refused to pay out the substantial settlement that Alice is expecting. In addition, a woman recently ran over Alice's foot with her car, breaking Alice's ankle. Now, Alice's savings are almost all gone and she is trying to make ends meet by selling houses. Unfortunately, as yet, she hasn't sold a single home. Can things get any worse?

It turns out that they can. One day, instead of going home on the school bus, Alice's kids get into a car with a strange woman. Alice later gets a call from a kidnapper who says that she has the kids, and that she will kill them if Alice doesn't turn over a large ransom. When the police and the FBI come calling, they turn out to be clumsy and ineffectual, and Alice is terrified that her kids will die.

Ed McBain's cynicism and dry sense of humor are on full display in this breezy and fast moving crime novel. The cops resemble the Keystone variety; although they mean well, their ineptitude and bungling may lead to disaster. Alice is a smart woman with good instincts and a fierce love for her children. She correctly concludes that the police are more of a hindrance than a help. Alice's low-life brother in law, Rafe, an ex-con, makes an appearance, and she gets moral support from her friend, Charlie, and her sister, Carol. However, when push comes to shove, Alice feels that she is all alone in the world and she may have to solve this crime herself if she is ever to see her kids again.

"Alice in Jeopardy" is not a great novel. The characters are hastily drawn, the plot has several predictable elements, and the story line has one too many illogical twists and turns. However, McBain can write a decent novel in his sleep, and he manages to keep everything going with witty dialogue, lots of action, and a satirical look at the way that some law enforcement officers and members of the media put their own interests ahead of helping others. I have always suspected that McBain is a bit of a misanthrope, and "Alice in Jeopardy" once again supports McBain's thesis that it is impossible to overestimate people's greed, selfishness, and stupidity.

Rating:
Summary: Predictable plot
Review: Alice Glendenning is living a nightmare. Her beloved husband has
drowned and his body never recovered. Her children have been
kidnapped and the ransom demand is the same amount as his life
insurance check, should it ever arrive. Add to the mix a car
accident where her ankle is broken and a visit from her jailbird
brother-in-law ,Rafe.

Although I felt the Ed Mcbain wrote an interesting tale, including some snappy lines,
I felt the story was predictable and not a winner in my book.



Rating:
Summary: a WINNER
Review: Eight months have passed since stockbroker Eddie Glendenning drowned off of Cape October on the Florida Gulf Coast. His wife Alice struggles to raise their two preadolescent children as her income dwindles to almost nothing while the life insurance company "eternally" processes her claim.

As her bank account is almost empty, Alice unsuccessfully tries to sell real estate. Just when she thinks she is one step from bottoming out, she finds the chasm underneath her feet goes much deeper than she ever imagined. Her two children have been abducted by two people demanding a $250,000 ransom of which she can emit payment in the low four digits unless they accept credit; if she talks to the police, the kidnappers warn of dire consequences. Before Alice can decide what to do Rosie the housekeeper calls the cops. Suddenly Alice feels that she fell through the rabbit hole, as law enforcement, family members, friends, strangers, and other ilk turn her home into a three ring circus.

Whether it is a police procedural or a thriller, no one consistently does it better than Ed McBain does (almost feel sorry for the rest). His latest tale is terrific, hooking the audience from the start as Alice, already struggling for her and her children to survive while also mourning her loss, suddenly finds she falling through a rabbit hole. The story line is action-packed with a fabulous cast especially the heroine, but also humorous as everyone wants to assist (this reviewer kept thinking of Groucho Marx's ship cabin scene in A Night at the Opera. Bottom line is that Mr. McBain does it again with his latest triumph.

Harriet Klausner


Rating:
Summary: A solid effort from an old pro
Review: I'll call it 3 1/2 stars on a fairly demanding personal scale.

There's a reason McBain has sold more than 100 million books these past 50 years: He's very good. The stand-alone Alice in Jeopardy is a departure from his 87th Precinct series but not really a departure from the kind of novel he normally writes. It has perhaps a few more comedic moments, but all the essentials of a good crime novel remain. Scammers, cops and a streamlined story that never relents from barreling forward page after page after page.

I won't bother recapping the plot (details can be found in the product description and other editorial reviews). McBain has clearly recycled some of his previous research: $250,000 in counterfeit "super" bills figure into the story, just as counterfeit bills figured prominently in Money, Money, Money, his 87th Precinct effort from a few years back. I will say that McBain -- largely through sparkling dialogue -- gets a lot of mileage out of a fairly thin plot and very little violence. The only criticisms I have are that a couple of the characters seem superfluous; the plot isn't nearly as complex as many of McBain's other novels, where parallel storylines come together elegantly in the end; and the identity of the kidnapper (the mastermind, anyway) is hardly a tough puzzle to crack. Also, he takes several cheap shots at the Bush administration, which sounded more to me like author intrusion rather than genuine characterization. Still, like most of his many dozens of previous novels, Alice is a brisk, compelling read.

In my view, McBain's writing peaked from about the early 1980s to the mid-1990s -- the 87th Precinct novels from that period are astonishingly good, and the Matthew Hope books remain terribly underappreciated. I've read about 40 of his novels, and I'd say that in the whole of the five-decade-long McBain canon, Alice ranks somewhere in the middle. Not great, but pretty good.

Rating:
Summary: Ed McBain Is Finally Getting Too Lazy
Review: That's right. Ed McBain fell down this time.

The lean, snappy dialogue is still there. The details of how to commit an interesting crime are still there. And the plot even contains some police procedural stuff, even if the 87th Precinct isn't the locale of this story.

Unfortunately, the reader can "feel" McBain cutting corners. You can almost hear the ticker counting, telling him that he has to finish a certain number of words before the day is out. The depth, detail, and humor that make up the signature of the best work by Ed McBain/Evan Hunter are missing here. I wish I'd simply waited for the next 87th Precinct title.

Rating:
Summary: McBain Fails
Review: This is not your typical McBain book. The plot and the characters are not believable at all. This seems to be a put down on all local law enforcement as well as FBI. I long for new Matthew Hope or the 87th stories, which are the author's strong points. I will keep this in my library but unlike all my others by McBain this will not be reread.

Rating:
Summary: (3 1/2) A Different Type of Ed McBain Story
Review: This is the story of six days in the life of Alice Glendenning, a thirty-four year widow who has tried to maintain a veneer of normalcy in her life since her husband Eddie disappeared nine months ago while alone in a small boat during rough weather off the coast of Florida. In order to support herself and her two children, Alice has taken a job as a real estate agent until Eddie is officially declared dead and she receives the proceeds of his double indemnity life insurance policy. While Alice is understandably still griefstricken over Eddie's death, she is attempting to move on with her life for the sake of the two kids, Ashley, her ten year old daughter, and Jamie, her eight year old son who has refused to speak since his father's death.

Suddenly on Wednesday, May 12th, ALICE finds herself IN JEOPARDY when she is hit by a car driven by Jennifer Redding while she is crossing Founders Boulevard to have lunch after showing several homes to Reginald (Webb) Webster, a prospective client who she hopes will finally be the source of her first commissions since joining Lane Realty. After having her broken ankle put in a cast at the local emergency room, she returns home only to be greeted by her part-time housekeeper, Rosie Garrity, with the news that her kids were not on the school bus that usually brings them home. As Alice is trying to locate them, the telephone rings and a woman's voice says "I have your children. Don't call the police, or they'll die." Suddenly, it appears that ALICE's remaining hope for happiness in her future and perhaps even the children's lives are IN JEOPARDY.

At this point the storyline could be expected to follow the standard Ed McBain police procedural template, but in fact it heads off in a completely different direction. First, it is not an 87th Precinct story with Carella, fat Ollie, and all the other crime hardened detectives from THE BIG, BAD CITY, rather it occurs in Port October, a small waterfront Florida town with a small town police department typified by detective Wilbur Sloate and his partner Marcia Di Luca, whose efforts to find the kidnappers are initially thwarted by Alice's fears that her cooperation with the police will further endanger her children's lives. But more than the venue is different; the story is told from the various perspectives of several of the participants, often with long segments of stream of consciousness narrative to provide the historical background on the relationship between many of the characters. Furthermore, the characters keep proliferating. There is Charlie Hobbs, one of the few friends Alice can turn to in this time of crisis. Soon Detective Sloate and his partner Di Luca in a juridictional dispute with FBI Agent Sally (Balloons) Bellew and her partner, Felix Forbes. Alice's ex-con brother-in-law and long haul truck driver Rafe unexpectedly stops by and soon her sister Carol is on her way from Atlanta. Then, Alice is distracted by a threat during a meeting with Rudy Angelet and David Holmes, who claim they have Eddie's markers for a large gambling debt. Of course, on a parallel track we are watching the activities of the blond woman who picked up the kids in a blue Impala and her black female accomplice. In addition, there are much more detailed and explicit scenes of seduction and bedroom escapades than are usual in the author's work.

The surprise is that rather than being written as a straight kidnapping mystery - tense and deadly serious - this written as a parody, the police efforts almost seem like the Keystone Kops at times. The reader soon understands that it will be up to Alice to solve the mystery and rescue her children; thus the story's perspective is really that of a victim procedural. Furthermore, most readers will have figured out the kidnapper's identity well before it is revealed three quarters of the way through the story. And in another surprise from McBain, the reader becomes increasingly hopeful that rather than this story simply involving the solution of another case and the capture of the perps, it might somehow manage to conclude with at least some semblance of a happy ending for Alice and her family.

My decision to round my rating up to four stars was based on the fact that I believe that the author achieved his objectives and that the book was enjoyable on its own terms. The story was engaging, it was a very easy, fast paced read, and it contained abundant examples of McBain's insightful observations about the fragility of human relationships and attention to details during his terse descriptions of people, places and events. Despite my enjoyment of this story once my preconceptions were put aside about thirty pages into the book, I certainly hope that his next novel is a police procedural involving our old friends, the detectives of the 87th Precinct. Thus, if he feels that it is necessary to experiment with his successful formula developed in the almost fifty years since the publication of COP HATER, whether it is to provide a fresh perspective for his readers or to keep himself interested, I hope that he returns to the type of very interesting approaches that he pursued in his recent novels FAT OLLIE'S BOOK (review 1/20/2003) or the truly enjoyable and creative (if depressing) THE FRUMIOUS BANDERSNATCH (review 12/26/2003).

Tucker Andersen

Rating:
Summary: The years have not dulled Ed McBain's talent
Review: When a novelist has been plying his trade for more than one-half century, it may be difficult for a book reviewer to find new language to describe the author's latest endeavor. Ed McBain, who also writes under his true name of Evan Hunter, has been producing a wide range of literary efforts since the publication of his first bestselling novel, THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, in 1954. One cannot even catalogue the efforts of this prolific writer, which have included upwards of fifty 87th Precinct police procedurals, the Matthew Hope series, and a long list of novels covering a wide range of subjects. Along the way McBain has been honored by mystery writing organizations in England and America. He truly is a legend of American writing.

ALICE IN JEOPARDY is McBain's latest mystery effort, a book that offers readers some new and different elements of style and plot while maintaining many of the tried and true essentials that make his novels such a quality reading adventure.

For Alice Glendenning, the heroine of ALICE IN JEOPARDY, life has been a recent string of calamities. Eight months earlier her husband, Eddie, was lost at sea in a boating accident. The accident had occurred shortly after the Glendenning family had moved to Florida in an attempt to reinvigorate Eddie's flagging investment career. Now widowed and the mother of two young children, Alice desperately needs the infusion of insurance policy proceeds to keep her precarious financial state from collapsing. She has taken a job as a real estate agent but has yet to make her first sale. To top off her troubles, on her way home from work, a traffic accident puts her leg in a cast and makes work almost impossible. Then, for reasons that Alice cannot fathom, her children, Ashley and Jamie, are kidnapped and ransom demands are made. Quite a bit going on, and we just finished chapter one.

There is an entertaining irony in the law enforcement response to the report of the kidnapping. McBain has spent the greater part of his writing life introducing readers to police officers who are quietly competent crime fighters, solving mysteries with deep thought and hard work. McBain's cops are not flashy superheroes; they are just lunch-pail working men and women. But the law enforcement crews appearing in ALICE IN JEOPARDY are nothing more than keystone cops in their incompetence and clumsiness. Three different police agencies become involved in attempting to locate Alice's children. All of them appear to be interested in the publicity and glory of a high-profile arrest. None of them seem to care about the most important thing in the world to Alice, her children.

While McBain takes great and humorous delight in skewering the bumbling efforts of the Florida law enforcement officials involved in Alice's case, there is still a kidnapping to be successfully solved. All of the characters introduced to the reader in the opening pages of the novel reappear in some important fashion to help resolve the escapade that serves as the underpinning of ALICE IN JEOPARDY. Throughout the adventure readers will find comfort in the classic ingredients of an Ed McBain mystery: real people confronting real problems in a real manner with wit and wisdom as detailed by an experienced and renowned author.

For fifty years readers have come to expect enjoyable, quality writing from a long and treasured list of novels. The years have not dulled Ed McBain's talent.

--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman