Even the Wicked: A Matthew Scudder Novel (Matthew Scudder Mysteries)
Page 34
Kirkus Reviews
“Block’s story telling and plot-planning skills run at full speed. EVEN THE WICKED is no blood-and-guts detective story. It’s a skillfully crafted mystery that has an amazing cast of fascinating characters. Block’s characters have an emotional depth that always seems to lift his stories above those of other mystery writers…In the end, the reader will be left asking the same old question: ‘When’s the next Matthew Scudder novel coming out?’”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“There is a new Matt Scudder novel by Lawrence Block in the stores, and you have to go right for that.”
New York Daily News
“Like the best roller coasters, this one carries readers through a series of hills and valleys…Block cleverly and readably knits all the subplots neatly into one piece.”
Denver Post
“Lawrence Block is a master of crime fiction; the Matthew Scudder novels are among the finest detective novels penned this century.”
Jonathan Kellerman
“Block’s crime novels are embedded in the streets of New York City…It takes a writer like Lawrence Block to find the humor, the horror, and the only-in-New York absurdity of a vigilante serial killer who calls himself ‘the Will of the People’…The story has some sharp angles and the usual fancy footwork from our intrepid private eye.”
The New York Times Book Review
“Lawrence Block is the best writer working in the private eye genre today…Scudder is one of the most vivid characters in crime fiction…Block’s ear for dialogue and eye for New York life are as sharp as ever.”
Newark Star-Ledger
“Matthew Scudder will always be one of my favorite detectives.”
Orlando Sentinel
“Scudder doggedly pursues his investigations while offering readers more insights into his life and the evermore bizarre life of his city…Block has graced fans with another wonderfully textured Scudder novel.”
Booklist
“Scudder is tough…the quintessential New York hero…EVEN THE WICKED rings true to New Yorkers and those who wish they were.”
The New York Times
“Block’s writing is clean and muscular, with that rarity in his trade, high humor.”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“The plots [are] ingeniously intertwined . . Block’s ingenuity in finding new motives for crime is endless, his narration polished, his entertainment value high.”
Publishers Weekly
“Block dusts off the old ‘murder in a locked room’ gambit and brings it freshly up to date…Well done, Lawrence Block, well done.”
Maine Sunday Telegram
EVEN THE WICKED. Copyright © 1997 by Lawrence Block. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.
PerfectBound™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
MS Reader edition v 1. August 2002 eISBN 0-06-053357-9
First Avon Books printing: February 1998
10 9 8 7 6
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EVEN THE WICKED. Copyright © 1997 by Lawrence Block. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.
PerfectBound™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
MS Reader edition v 1. August 2002 eISBN 0-06-053357-9
First Avon Books printing: February 1998
10 9 8 7 6
Contents
Epigraph
1 On a Tuesday night in August I was sitting…
2 One newspaper column started the whole thing.
3 “I’ll tell you,” he said, “I just don’t know what…
4 Elaine was still up when I got home, watching a…
5 The next day was Sunday, and I didn’t have a…
6 Forty-eight hours later I’d made two more visits to the Horatio…
7 “It’s like he saw it coming,” Kevin Dahlgren said.
8 The big news over the weekend had to do with…
9 “An Open Letter to the People of New York.”…
10 It took me awhile to get away from Marty McGraw.
11 “The first night I went to Whitfield’s place,” I told Elaine.
12 Elaine was gone by the time I woke up.
13 It still didn’t have to mean anything.
14 By the time we got out of there TJ was…
15 “It could have been murder,” I said, “even if I…
16 The phone rang the next morning while we were having breakfast.
17 The letter had obviously been written after its author had….
18 The next couple of days were a three-ring circus for the media.
19 I couldn’t do much in what was left of that afternoon.
20 I called Viaticom a few minutes after nine the next morning…
21 I stayed put over the weekend.
22 You’d have thought it was a social call.
23 It was a long night.
24 You could almost say he’d been asking for it.
25 “Well, look who’s here,” he said.
26 SCUDDER: Please state your name for the record.
27 “You like irony,” I told Ray Gruliow.
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