Abandoned by user

This is not the first 87th Precinct mystery that I've read - I bought a whole bunch of them when the kindle editions went on sale for .99 back in 2012. This one wasn't available at the time, so I skipped it. The first one, Cop Hater, also wasn't available at that time, a fact which I just realized sitting down to write this review. 

So, I've read The Mugger, #2, and The Con Man #4, and now this one. I will go back and pick up Cop Hater next, since it is available for the Kindle Unlimited library, which is how I read this one. I haven't really checked, but I think that all of the books are available through KU at this point. 

Having gotten that organizational explanation out of the way, let's talk about The Pusher, which was published in 1956. The fictional city of Isola is the setting for the series of police procedurals, which is a stand-in, apparently, for New York City, although I mentally put the books in Baltimore, probably because they remind me so much Homicide, Life on the Streets, and the work of David Simon generally. In my mind, at least, it's a straight line, and a five decades, between Steve Carella and Frank Pembleton (and let me just say right now that I live for the day that Homicide is available for streaming).

I've read that it's not necessary to read the books in order, since they do not always share characters. I'm just guessing here, though, when I say that with a series that is this long running, it will benefit the reader to read them as close to in order as possible, both because of the character arcs and also because McBain is writing about work that went through extraordinary changes between 1954, when the series began, and 2005, when the 55th and final book was published. This is a series that lasted for 49 years, and saw the development of forensic techniques that Steve Carella could only have dreamed of when he was trying to solve the murders that occurred in 1956. 

This is very much a book of its time. The few women who exist between its pages are either wives or sex workers - and McBain uses a much less value neutral word than sex workers to describe them. The writing itself is journalistic in tone, without frills or lyricism, but it works for a series that feels very real. Isola in the 1950's is a grungy, high crime place, where drug users are called junkies and drug dealers are called pushers, and there is little empathy for either. 

I expect that it will take me years to complete the series (and I need ANOTHER reading project like I need a hole in my head, lol), if I ever do, but I am interested to see how McBain handles the advancements in criminology, women entering the workforce and other background elements in the series almost more than I am interested in the series itself. It strikes me that this series is very nearly a time capsule of American law enforcement in the mid-twentieth century to early twenty-first century, and this idea fascinates me.