THE LAST BEST HOPE (1998) by Ed McBain

This was designed as the last in the series of 13 Florida-based thrillers featuring lawyer Matthew Hope and to celebrate, Ed McBain turned it into a cross-over with his 87th Precinct mysteries, producing an entertaining legal-procedural-caper hybrid. For the purposes of this blog, I am treating it as the 48th book in the 87th Precinct series. Hope is recovering from a shooting which left him in a coma and in unsure about where his life might lead. In the meantime he gets involved with a wife, Jill, who is looking for her errant husband, Jack, last seen in Isola …

I offer the following review for Friday’s Forgotten Books meme run by Patti Abbott at her fab Pattinase blog

The Last Best Hope (87th Precinct series #48)
First Published: 1998
Leading players:  Steve Carella, Andy Parker

“We’ll try and find him for you,” Matthew said.
“Please,” she said. “The bastard.”

The Hope series were usually built around old fairy tales (though with adult language and sex thrown in) so here we have Jack and Jill, a married couple who haven’t seen each other for several months. Jill wants to find him so they can get a divorce. As she last heard of him in Isola, Matthew (who was originally from ‘up north’) gets in touch with the 87th and makes friends with Steve Carella, who unusually is not too busy. It is exactly a year since the events depicted in Nocturne, though one imagines that McBain must have been thinking about both of these books at the same time as they have a lot of overlapping material. Along with several shared jokes about the elderly, cats solving crimes in fiction and quips about who really wrote the Hitchcock film The Birds (it was McBain himself, as ‘Evan Hunter’), the author also continues his obsession with threesomes and swinging couples from the previous book. Here it turns out that Jack and Jill had, for the last eight years, been sharing their bed with Melanie, who has since left Jill and also moved up north to be with jack. But now she is back in Calusa and seems to have brought an old jail-bird with her, who soon turns up dead, sporting Jack’s credentials. Then the story gets really convoluted as we follow, in a series of flashbacks, the earlier experiences of the trio of lovers and plans to steal the terracotta cup from which Socrates reputedly drunk his hemlock. In fact we even get a flashback to 399 BC to see it happen …

“I just thought of a profession that’s hated even more than lawyers and cops.”
“Tell me.”
“Dentists.”

From the late 1970s, McBain usually solved the problem of needing to write books twice as long as he had hitherto needed to, due to changing market needs, by including not one but at least two main plots. Here we get a very tangled tale, with Hope involved in a seemingly straightforward missing person case but actually involved in a planned museum heist for an item worth several million dollars and several murders too, with the 87th (in the shape of Steve Carella, who ends up really liking Hope, and Andy Parker who of course instantly hates the guy) providing very much a secondary part of the story to hold up the rear. You cut, in truth, cut out all these scenes and the book would still work fine, but in fact the cross-over has a lot of charm. It’s not the first time that McBain made his 87th Precinct cop heroes into extras in their own series, having done this very successfully some thirty years earlier in He Who Hesitates; except here this does feel different because this was technically part of the Hope series. But this does pay off in a great scene in which the traditional Q&A that is usually found in the 87th books gets inverted, with Andy Parker on the receiving end with Hall doing the questioning, which is great fun. Either way, this is a fairly light-hearted tale (albeit with several murders along the way) with a variety of often unlikely criminal types trying to get the best of each other. The book often feels much more in keeping with the style of Elmore Leonard than McBain. In this case though, the end result is really not bad at all …

The Matthew Hope Mysteries

1. Goldilocks (1978)
2. Rumpelstiltskin (1981)
3. Beauty and the Beast (1982)
4. Jack and the Beanstalk (1984)
5. Snow White and Rose Red (1985)
6. Cinderella (1986)
7. Puss in Boots (1987)
8. The House that Jack Built (1988)
9. Three Blind Mice (1990)
10. Mary, Mary (1993)
11. There was a Little Girl (1994)
12. Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear (1996)
13. The Last Best Hope (1998)

You can check out my reviews of all the previous volumes at my 87 Precinct microsite.

***** (3 fedora tips out of 5)