Okay, so I finished the Dick Francis book earlier today. What can I say - McBain's 87th Precinct books are short - and tense. This one was actually under 200 pages. You can't fault the action, though.
There are actually three con men in the story, a pair who work doubles cons strictly for the money and a really nasty guy who cons unattractive spinsters out of their savings then feeds them a dinner well-laced with arsenic and dumps their bodies in the river.
Several of the cops we are getting acquainted with at the 87th are featured and I think Arthur Brown is a new addition to the cast. He has the distinction of being a black cop in a city in a time where the desk clerk can inform him that they don't rent rooms to niggers. Since the first call for their attention to the cash con guys is from a young black girl, he feels a particular interest in the case.
Detective Carella is the main point man on the other case, and his wife, Teddy, gets into the act in a big way.
I am slightly annoyed by the images of police files. I suppose it is nice that Kindle now supports images, but they are too small for me to read even with the scale as big as I have it. I suppose I could try increasing it even more, but that would slow me down so - even if it works on the images. So, I tried it, the scaling does work on the images, but if I continue to read at that scale I get 10 to 15 words on a page by actual count. I don't think I can click fast enough to read comfortably at that rate. What a gift it would have been for Grandmother, who was nearly blind. Before her death, my sister and I spent hours scanning the pages of a book that she wanted to reread and blowing them up and printing them so she could read them. Oh well, I just checked and that book is not available in a Kindle edition.
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