Ed McBain, author of the best-selling 87th Precinct novels, now takes you Downtown in a bold, new departure of a novel that will make you laugh, cry, and tingle with the special brand of electrifying suspense that only McBain knows how to generate. Downtown you’ll meet Michael Barnes, a lone out-of-town businessman in New York City on Christmas Eve with a couple of hours to kill before his plane leaves. It promises to be a sweet interlude when he meets a lovely blonde in a bar. But first his identification and all his money are stolen, and next his rental car — only to resurface on the other side of town with an unexpected passenger: a corpse. Here are every readers brightest, glittering fantasies and blackest nightmares about the Big Apple: big-shot movie producers, muggers with the instincts of Vietnamese guerrillas, cops who arrest the victims, mobsters who embrace you, thugs who tie you up, beautiful women who take you into their limousines, beautiful women who try to drive their stiletto heels through your skull, warehouses full of furs, jewels, and other valuables, smoky gambling dens in Chinatown, ritzy penthouse apartments, miserable dives... Michael Barnes has only twenty-four hours to survive the wildest ride in his life