Ed McBain: The Last Best Hope (USA 1999)

From the Publisher:
FROM THE HEAT OF MATTHEW HOPE'S SOUTH FLORIDA, TO THE ICE OF CARELLA'S 87TH PRECINCT...
She was a pretty lady who wore a little bathing suit to match the lime in her drink. He was an attorney who'd loved and lost and loved again. They came together because her husband was missing, or maybe he was dead, or maybe it didn't matter. Now Matthew Hope finds himself moving through a case where all the players are playing their own games, from kinky sex to high-class thievery, and everyone is playing it his own way. With one man already found dead on a Calusa beach with another man's I.D. in his pocket, Matthew Hope has one chance of getting at the truth. Follow a trail of lies to the city of stars, wanna-bes, and icy wind-where Hope will get help from a detective named Carella, of the 87th Precinct...

"A STORY ABOUT A GANG THAT CAN'T LOOT STRAIGHT... HOPE IS GOING OUT IN GREAT STYLE.... McBain assembles a cast of chump-change losers... and does so with a satisfying amount of smarty-pants asides and dialogue (at once funny and menacing) and even works in some inside jokes about himself." -- NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Ed McBain: The Last Best Hope. Warner Books, ISBN: 0446606731 (January, 1999), 291 p., $7.50.

Ed McBain: The Last Best Hope (UK 1998)

From the Publisher:
'A fine pace... a terrific climax.' -- Glasgow Herald
'A virtuoso... McBain never puts a foot wrong.' - Guardian

Matthew Hope only takes the case on because it seems so routine: attractive Jill Lawton wants to divorce her husband Jack who has disappeared into thin air, somewhere in the cold, cold north.

It's all a bit more complicated than that. First, Jack's dead body is found, but turns out not to be Jack at all. Then a second corpse turns up, a young woman known variously as Melanie and Holly. Then Jack Lawton's absurd plan to rob the Calusa museum gets underway. And Matthew Hope has become embroiled in another dangerous case, the kind that he swore he would never,

ever allow himself to be dragged into again...
With a little help from a detective called Steve Carella in the frigid north, Ed McBain's brilliant lawyer once again puts his own life on the line, in an unputdownable story of lust and lethality.

Many of Ed McBain's dazzling mysteries are available as New English Library paperbacks. Nocturne is the latest 87th Precinct story and Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear also features Matthew Hope. Coronet Books publishes Privileged Conversation, the newest novel written under his real name, Evan Hunter.

Ed McBain: The Last Best Hope. A Matthew Hope Mystery ...and introducing Detective Steve Carelle of the 87th Precinct. New English Library, ISBN: 0340695420 (August, 1998), 296 p., £5.99.

Ed McBain: The Last Best Hope (USA 1998)

From the Publisher:
From the cement and sin city of his 87th Precinct series to the balmy Florida of his Matthew Hope novels, Ed McBain's cops, lawyers, sexy women, and desperate men have captivated readers for decades. Now this bestselling author of more than eighty novels and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master offers his fans what may well be.

THE LAST BEST HOPE
The pretty lady sitting in attorney Matthew Hope's Calusa, Florida, office has legs long enough to stretch to Honolulu and blue eyes set wide in a beautiful face. Jill Lawton wants Hope to find her husband, Jack. Her tale is commonplace: a middle-aged husband goes north to look for work, finds another woman, doesn't come back. The embittered wife wants out-with alimony. It's the kind of manhunt Hope's associates Chambers, Kiley, & Lamb can normally handle with their private eyes closed.

But that is before a corpse turns up on a Calusa beach with Jack Lawton's ID in his pocket. Hope should have remembered the first axiom of being a criminal lawyer: the client always hides some-thing... such as the kinky, sizzling sex life this Jack and Jill preferred. Instead Hope asks for help from cops up north where Jack Lawton was last seen, and starts snooping around the Sunshine State himself. Here some slimy critters hide in the deep eddies and local watering holes. And here Hope, shaky from the gunshot wounds he barely survived, suddenly has second thoughts about tangling with them.

For Matthew Hope, the Lawton case signals a sea change in his life, an ending of relationships, a shift in values, and a look into the dark night of his own soul. And for every reader of Ed McBain's work, THE LAST BEST HOPE has characters that will give them a thrill -- as well as a complex, riveting plot that delivers one helluva knock-out surprise.

"The best crime writer in the business." -- Houston Post
"He is a superior stylist, a spinner of artfully designed and sometimes macabre plots." -- Newsweek
"A master.... As always in his novels, sharp, clear sentences trot briskly one after another.... As always, the funny stuff is funny and the scary parts scary." -- Time
"The author delivers the goods: wired action scenes, dialogue that breathes, characters with heart and characters who eat those hearts, and glints of unforgiving humor.... Ed McBain owns this turf." -- New York Times Book Review

ED McBAIN holds the Mystery Writers of America's coveted Grand Master Award. His books have sold over one hundred million copies, ranging from his most recent 87th Precinct novel, Nocturne, to the bestselling The Blackboard Jungle, the screenplay for Hitchcock's The Birds, and the bestselling Privileged Conversation, written under his own name of Evan Hunter. He lives in Connecticut.

Ed McBain: The Last Best Hope. A Novel. Warner Books, ISBN: 0446519901 (March, 1998), 296 p., $24.00.