Jack and the Beanstalk
by Ed McBain
Jack McKinney's mother thought he was a tennis bum. His sister
thought he was a cattle rustler. And McKinney himself thought
he was going to turn a bankrupt snapbean farm into a paying
operation. Never mind that in the sandy soil of Florida's West
Coast, snapbeans were not a cash crop.
So on a steamy August Friday, the unemployed twenty-year-old
slapped down a $4,000 deposit on the farm, refused financing on
the remaining $36,000 purchase price, which he promised to hand
over in cash at the closing, and instructed attorney Matthew Hope
to push the deal through before the owner could change his mind.
Four days later, McKinney was dead -- stabbed fourteen times,
his plush condo apartment ransacked. And there was no trace of
the $36,000.
As Matthew Hope is drawn deeper into the dead boy's affairs, he
runs into a far-from-grieving mother, a sexually provoking sister
and her punk boyfriend, a New Orleans whore with a steel-trap
mind and a sudden windfall -- and more murder. He also runs up
against the complexities of a love affair with a beautiful woman
who happens to be nearly twenty years his senior.
Jack and the Beanstalk
Series
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