Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels now comprise the longest sustained series in American crime fiction, and from the beginning he envisioned the books as a continuing, interrelated group of stories.

Given this history, it is hard not to read each new addition as a continuation of those novels which have gone before. So one of the more instructive ways to look at Nocturne would be to compare it with novels from the series in any of the past five decades over which the series has been written.

Because the 87th Precinct series now has been running since the early 1950s, McBain has worked out an ingenious way to deal with the passing of time in the books. If he followed a strict chronology, obviously the detectives like Steve Carella, who has been featured in the books since their inception, would now be in their seventies, well...