Although the 87th Precinct books constitute a series, they stand alone as individual novels. The characters remain pretty much the same and the location of the plots is always Isola and its several boroughs, but the way each volume is presented differs and this is the result of McBain's skill as a writer. In Nocturne, for example, McBain uses multiple, parallel story lines which crisscross throughout the narrative. It is like listening to a fugue with various themes which overlap, counterpoint and finally resolve at the end of the story.

The novel opens with an elderly woman found shot to death, along with her cat, on the threshold of her modest apartment. She is wearing a now decrepit, but once elegant, fur coat. Her apartment smells of fish and the detectives find bones and heads in the kitchen. It looks like another murder of one of the city's...