Alice in Jeopardy [Paperback]

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

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.

This book was to be the start of a new series of mysteries by Ed McBain - but, alas, he passed away in 2005 after only completing this volume.

This book studies the crime from the perspective of the victim, Alice Glendenning, who must take charge of her life when her two children are kidnapped and held for ransom. Alice and her sister are well-drawn characters as is her sister's husband, Rafe, a truck driver and ex-convict. The plot is clever and the clues are difficult to spot and the mystery and the ending are very satisfying.

I will miss Ed McBain/Evan Hunter very much.

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