[McBain's hero in "Where There's Smoke"] is a retired detective lieutenant named Benjamin Smoke, and McBain labors greatly to make him believable.

But he doesn't really succeed…. Smoke is a bored man; he has left the force because he is bored. Crime is predictable, criminals are stupid…. He has always solved anything that came his way; he wants to fail in a case, to come across a mind smarter than his.

All this is, of course, is an authorial gimmick: McBain has seized upon it as a means of attempting to infuse his character with something a bit different. But Smoke is an ordinary man, basically, who in this book has an ordinary case with ordinary criminals and an ordinary solution. "Where There's Smoke" (even the title is a gimmick) is competent, but there is not a shred of originality in its plotting or characterization, much less its...