[Ice] is grim stuff, as McBain usually is. By now McBain has the 87th Precinct down pat: he could probably write in his sleep. But then Arnold Bennett wrote a good bit of his prose in his sleep too, and if a writer really knows his craft, there surely comes a time when it is possible to coast. Ice begins with a seemingly senseless killing on a New York City street—not a novel idea—and moves through the underworlds of drugs, diamond smuggling, and a scam involving theater tickets, with the usual patented McBain ease, in which real people sound like real people. In the classic mystery every detail counts, or may be assumed to count; with McBain, as with real life, there is an enormous amount of what proves to be truly irrelevant detail, and none of it seems like padding…. We are told that Ice...