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    Sadie When She Died
    Sadie When She Died
    Sadie When She Died
    Audiobook6 hours

    Sadie When She Died

    Written by Ed McBain

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Christmas is coming. But erudite attorney Gerry Fletcher got his present early: his wife’s body with a knife buried in it. Though he shamelessly cops to being happy she’s dead, his alibi is airtight and all signs point to a burglary gone bad. But even when detectives Steve Carella and Bert Kling follow the clues to a junky punk and get a full confession, Carella can’t quit thinking there’s something about the case that’s as phony as a sidewalk Santa’s beard. Maybe it’s because the victim’s husband wants to pal around with the suspicious cop on a cryptic pub-crawl through the urban jungle. Or maybe it’s the dead woman’s double identity and little black book full of secret lovers. Whether she was Sarah the shrewish wife or Sadie the sex-crazy swinger, there’s more to her murder than just a bad case of “wrong place, wrong time.” And Carella won’t rest till his cuffs are on the killer.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9781480593923
    Sadie When She Died
    Author

    Ed McBain

    Ed McBain, a recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's coveted Grand Master Award, was also the first American to receive the Diamond Dagger, the British Crime Writers Association's highest award. His books have sold more than one hundred million copies, ranging from the more than fifty titles in the 87th Precinct series (including the Edgar Award–nominated Money, Money, Money) to the bestselling novels written under his own name, Evan Hunter—including The Blackboard Jungle (now in a fiftieth anniversary edition from Pocket Books) and Criminal Conversation. Fiddlers, his final 87th Precinct novel, was recently published in hardcover. Writing as both Ed McBain and Evan Hunter, he broke new ground with Candyland, a novel in two parts. He also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. He died in 2005. Visit EdMcBain.com.

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    Reviews for Sadie When She Died

    3.5/5

    74 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Super well written pulp police procedural by master Ed McBain, with excellent narration. Check it out!
    • 4/5
      "Sadie When She Died", but Sarah Fletcher when she was alive. And her husband seems happier about the former! And even stranger, he begins to wine and dine Detective Carella after the murder, as the investigation is in full effect, with Carella fully convinced that the man murdered his wife - throwing even more suspicion on him! “Fletcher seemed to be playing a dangerous game, in which he taunted Carella with bits and pieces of knowledge, and dared him to fit them together into a meaningful whole that would prove he had slain Sarah.” Idiot!A good story, and pretty much just the one case. Kling has a romance or two to work out, but they aren't really cases, per se. And, for a little something different in this series, Kling takes the terrible beating and gets knocked out, NOT Carella! Nice for Steve, eh? Not so much for Bert..."...and he thought of a despairing junkie in a prison cell, who had taken his own life without ever having known he had not taken the life of another. It was Christmas Day. Sometimes, none of it made any goddamn sense at all."
    • 4/5
      I chose to read Sadie When She Died by Ed McBain because it appears on the British Crime Writers Assoc. Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time and the H.R.F. Keating 100 Best Crime and Mystery Books. This is the 26th book in the author’s 87th Precinct series that features the police and detectives of a precinct in an imaginary American city.I can certainly see why this book appears on both lists, as it is another gem in the police procedural genre. It features Detective Steve Carella as he follows his hunch as to who killed Sarah Fletcher, the junkie burglar who left his fingerprints on the knife or Sarah’s husband who openly rejoices in her death. There is also a side story that follows Detective Bert Kling as he recovers from a recent breakup with his girlfriend and becomes intrigued by one of the witnesses in the Fletcher case.While there isn’t really a mystery to be solved here, the book paints a realistic picture of policing in the 1970s. It is set in the days leading up to Christmas and I enjoyed both the descriptions of the cold weather and the seasonal crimes that the precinct had to deal with. Sadie When She Died is fast paced and offers some great dialogue that immerses the reader in the story. As it was written and published in the 1970s it is somewhat dated, especially in it’s treatment and description of women but overall, this was a very good read.
    • 4/5
      Great dialogue, flawless plotting , making the difficult appear easy; a wonderful example of great skill and humor: that is just what you expect from Ed McBain. A Christmas-winter theme provides the atmosphere that limns each of his novels.
    • 4/5
      Seasonally appropriate procedural with some mixed up notions of love and addiction and the things that drive men to murder.

      Poor Bert Kling, so unlucky in love.
    • 4/5
      Ed McBain’s Sadie When She Died (1972), the 26th of McBain’s 87th Precinct books that began with Cop Hater in 1956, is about the death two weeks before Christmas (by a particularly vicious ripping of her belly) of Sarah Fletcher, whose husband, after summoning the police, makes the unusual comment that he’s very glad she’s dead. Detective Steve Carella is the main character in a cast that includes Detective Bert Kling (whose fiancée, Cindy Forrest, has just broken their engagement), Detective-Lieutenant Peter Byrnes, and Detective Meyer.It soon develops that a drug addict named Ralph Corwin burglarized the Fletcher apartment and admits to stabbing (not disemboweling) Sarah Fletcher. They find Corwin through routine police work: although his fingerprints are not on record, the crime lab technician, Marshall Davies, reports (23-26) that the footprints indicate that he injured himself jumping from the second story window, so they ask area doctors if they treated anyone the day after the homicide, and the doctor who treated Corwin, and to whom Corwin gave his real name and address, responds. Meanwhile a girl in the apartment building, Nora Simonov, tells the detectives she saw a man in the basement, limping, and she later identifies Corwin.Carella is convinced that the husband finished the job Corwin only started, and he becomes more convinced of it when Fletcher invites him for lunch and conveys to him, without saying so, that he knows Carella suspects him and is sure that he’ll never be able to prove it. Unwilling to consider the case closed, Carella interviews the men whose names and addresses are written at the back of Sarah Fletcher’s address book. He discovers that she picked up men in singles bars where she called herself Sadie Collins. Carella talks his superior into surveillance of Fletcher, who isn’t around when it starts, but he soon calls Carella and invites him on a pub crawl. The bars, Carella later discovers through interviewing one of Sarah/Sadie’s pickups who turns out to be a lesbian, are indicated in initials after the names in Sadie’s phone book. All but the lesbian’s name are also followed with the initials TG; we figure out before Carella that these must mean “told Gerald” about her affair with this man.McBain’s city is not named, but it’s obviously New York in thin disguise. It has two rivers, called Dix (94) and Harb (17), a park (Silvermine Park) and a fancy apartment area nearby called Silvermine Oval, a big hospital like Bellevue (Buenavista—the beautiful view becomes Spanish instead of French; Cindy Forrest is an intern there), and an artistic district called the Quarter (Greenwich Village-97). Manhattan is Isola, another city section is named Riverhead (Brooklyn?), still another named Majesta (Queens?) Calm’s Point (Long Island?), Bethtown, the Stem (adjacent to the theater district-109). Carella has a beautiful wife, a deaf mute named Teddy, and a twin son and daughter. He tells a bartender that he was in World War II—this seems unlikely, since it would make Carella at least forty-five at the time of the book’s appearance.Bert Kling tries to date Nora Simonov, who tells him from the beginning that she’s interested is someone else, and we begin to suspect that the someone else might be Gerald Fletcher. But this subplot does not turn out to connect to the main one: Nora’s boyfriend is in prison, but he has a friend on the outside who waylays and beats up Kling. Kling finds him by reading Nora’s letters from her convict lover, confronts the man who beat him up, is almost killed, but kills his attacker. Meanwhile Carella is tailing Fletcher and listening through a bug in his car; he hears Fletcher tell the story of how he killed his wife and intervenes just as Fletcher is about to kill his girl friend, to whom he’s told the story.