The brandy, I told myself. Probably be a good idea to stay away from it. Stick to what you're used to. Stick to bourbon. I went on over to Armstrong's. A little bourbon would take the edge off the brandy rush. A little bourbon would take the edge off almost anything. ~A Stab in the Dark Ah, Matt. Things are getting pretty dark for you my friend. Rock bottom is rushing up to meet you at about 200 miles an hour. It's going to hit like a freight train and I'm afraid you won't even see it coming. Ca...

Nine years ago, eight women were gruesomely slain with an icepick. The killer was finally apprehended and it turns out he was in an asylum at the time of the eighth murder. So who the hell killed Barbara Ettinger? That's what her father, Charles London, is paying Matthew Scudder to find out...Lawrence Block does it again. In the fourth volume, Matthew Scudder struggles with his alcoholism and follows a trail nine years cold. Once again, Block did a good job tricking me into thinking I knew who t...

A good mystery in a stock standard PI way. Felt repetitive at times with Scudder bouncing from interview to interview without much plot or character development in between.

This book is my fav Scudder so far and not because of the plot,mystery he has to detect this time. It was the atmosphere,Scudder himself running around in NYC and making the setting coming alive so well. Scudder struggling with his alcoholism,his life in general is interesting as always. The case was interesting,not too flashy,convulted plot twists like there is too often in PI stories. I like it was mostly instinct,legwork much more realistic than what you usually see in the subgenre.After this...

My least favorite of the Scudder books so far. My enjoyment of this series comes from Scudder dealing with all his personal issues not from the cases he runs. Not that the cases are bad, that's just not what thrills me. This book had a couple of those moments, talking with another cop who left the force, discussing drinking habits with a new girlfriend, a phone conversation with his ex-wife but not enough for me. Block does a good job of portraying the mundane aspects of investigating but that's...

When you’ve hit a point where you’ve read hundreds of books and age starts to degrade your memory, you sometimes doubt your previous assessments. I’d read most of the Scudder novels anywhere from 10 to 15 years ago, and while I thought they were very good, I’d started to wonder if they were actually as good as I remembered. Having reread the first four, I’m very happy to find that these are actually even better than I originally thought.Matt gets hired by a man whose daughter, Barbara, was suppo...

Days off, laying on the sofa reading. Sweet dreams are made of these. Add a drunken PI on a self destructive life path and the dream turns slightly darker. Hooray for Lawrence Block!Matt Scudder, unlicensed PI returns for his fourth instalment, this time doing a favour for a bereaved father who has recently discovered that his dead daughter is the only "victim" of a captured serial killer that he couldn't possibly have murdered. Once more treading the unsafe streets of New York, bourbon and coff...

The first 158 pages of this 180 page easy to read book was fantastic: tough, gritty, relentless. But then came the last 22 pages which came close to ruining the whole book. The first 158 pages deserves a 5-star rating, the last 22 pages just suck. Block's editor let him down on this one. He (or she) should have given the manuscript back to him with instructions to fix the ending. Block is a good writer and Scudder in a classic down-on-his luck detective with ethics, but I don't know why Block co...

Nobody better than Block and the Matthew Scudder series.

I enjoyed this a lot. A quick read and with a surprisingly amount of character work along with a pretty good mystery.

Matthew Scudder prowls the streets of New York City for the fourth time in A Stab in the Dark. By now the character has been firmly established: Matt is an ex-cop who left the force under tragic circumstances and who now works unofficially as a private detective. He doesn't have a license; he doesn't pay taxes, and he doesn't fill out paperwork. But sometimes he does a "favor" for a friend and the "friend" shows her or her gratitude by giving Matt money.He also drinks. Heavily by this point. But...

These Matthew Scudder books aren't action-packed, sometimes they're even slow, but boy howdy, do I ever enjoy them!I like the picture you get of New York City in the '70s (At least with these first few books in the series. I'm not sure about the rest, because I haven't read them). I love Scudder's character. He's not in it for the money. Admirable. I like the light mystery involved in each book. Lawrence Block keeps you guessing! All of these things and probably a few more I'm forgetting right n...

I was in kind of a cranky mood when I began this installment of my adventures with Matthew Scudder- in one of those nitpicky modes where anything that can annoy you will do so. I even got so far as starting on a bit of a tirade regarding the use of an icepick as a murder weapon (see below). But, this is what makes Lawrence Block such a stud of an author- if I had just been patient, I would have saved myself from my own ramblings re. the dangerous weapon of choice, as Scudder, too, takes issue wi...

This fourth book in the Matt Scudder series is an absorbing mystery in itself, but it also deepens and darkens Block's portrait of his hard-drinking, guilt-ridden hero, and, through the use of two effective foils (an alcoholic woman sculptor and a damaged former cop), increases Scudder's self-knowledge and points him toward change.Scudder is hired to investigate the case of Barbara Ettinger, classified as a victim of “The Icepick Killer” when she was murdered nine years ago. But “The Icepick Kil...

A lightweight read at only 156 pages. Good suspense and interesting mystery.In this one, a serial killer is caught by police. The catch? He only confesses to seven of the murders and has an airtight alibi for the eighth. The father of the eighth victim realizes he needs a new kind of closure and hires Scudder to investigate. He pursues it like a terrier; hanging on, chasing down leads from nine years ago, drinking his way through the city. After he interviews the remarried husband and his new wi...

This is by far, my favorite of the Scudder books at this point. Once again, I am presented with the 5 star problem. With the other 3 getting the same rating, how do I differentiate between the installments? I don't have an answer for that. Stop making me feel bad!I really wanted to open this review with the line, "My favorite part was when Scudder drinks coffee with bourbon" (get it? 'cause that's like 90% of the novel) but I thought better of it. Scudder's boozing is totally out of control in A...

In The Midst of Death, a former colleague asks him how he is doing, asks him about drinking, suggests he doesn't have to “climb back inside the bottle” when things go south. And they do, and he does. In this book, a woman named Janice Corwin he interviews for a case calls him out, while they are drinking: “You know what we are, Matthew? We’re both a couple of drunks,” and he goes so far at this point to admit he is “in the drinking life.” If this were a book simply about crime, well, the alcohol...

*3.5 Stars*It's going to get harder and harder writing fresh reviews for these Lawrence Block novels, that don't sound terribly repetitive! Once again he has written a solid piece of detective mystery fiction in this latest installment in his Matthew Scudder series, about an ex-cop who lives a lonely life in a hotel room in Manhattan and does "favors" for people as an unlicensed private investigator. In this novel, Scudder takes on a nine-year old cold case after a serial killer is finally caugh...

Quite a short Scudder story which really doesn't pickup a sense of tension and get moving until late in the game. The story follows the typical formula. Scudder does the mundane investigative work of tracking down leads that mostly prove worthless. And even more than usual, as the case is years cold. Then, after pounding miles of pavement, beating on doors and visiting way too many bars, enough clues somehow manage to seep into his subconscious to form something concrete. As always, drinking and...

Forever Questions Answered About New York City BoroughsFrom the book...SoHo is from South of Houston (street location)Tribeca is from Triangle Below Canal***********Matthew Scudder is such a tortured anguished, unlicensed P.I. I hate that overused word for these protagonist and hate that word protagonist, too. Let's say Scudder has some definite daytime and night-time mares (Cockney slang, folks, easy to figure out.)Those mares walk with him every waking and sleeping moment for this ex-cop who r...