Ed McBain "King's Ransom"
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Ed McBain
Douglas King is rich. A nice house in the best part of the city, servants, big cars, fashionable clothes for his attractive wife, Diane. He’s worked hard all his life to get where he is today, and now he’s planning a big business deal. It’s a very expensive deal, and there are enemies working against King, but if he wins, he’ll get to be company president. If he doesn’t win, he’ll be out on the street.
Sy Barnard and Eddie Folsom are not rich. They’re smalltime crooks, not very successful, but they want all the good things that money can buy. So they plan the perfect kidnapping. ‘Five hundred thousand dollars by tomorrow morning, or we kill the boy,’ they tell Douglas King.
It’s a beautiful plan. But Eddie’s wife, Kathy, doesn’t like it, and neither does Detective Steve Carella of the 87th Precinct. And Sy and Eddie have taken the wrong boy - not King’s son, but the Reynolds boy, the son of King’s chauffeur. And the chauffeur doesn’t have five hundred thousand dollars.
So who’s going to pay the ransom?
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Text Analysis: Unique words: about 1,800. Total words: about 19,830
Hard words: ain’t, ash-tray, attractive, Auto Squared, bastard, battery, big-shot, in black, blonde, bump, burst, cast, chauffer, cookies, cop, cowboys and Indians, crook, darling, garbage, golf, grand, guts, guy, headquarters, hell, honey, instruction, interrupt, Jewish, kid, kidnap, laboratory, ma’ma, mind, Mom, oscillator, professor, precinct, punk, ransom, red, reform school, scientist, search me, servant, smart, smash, state, stock, store, sweater, trace, transmitter, tycoon, vice-president, wiretap
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