I liked this book because it was light reading during my vacation! mcBain is always an exciting author. I would recommend it to my friends who like mysteries. The thing I did not like was it seemed to start in the middle of the story but it did make it come together. I rated it 5 stars because I enjoyed it and needed a book that was good reading but did not require a lot of guessing!

More a novella than a novel, this is a good but not great McBain story. It actually has an amateur doing the detective work, which McBain (Evan Hunter) said in later interviews was never realistic. But I suppose it was writing stories like this one that taught him that.

Even the Wicked is a novella-length story. Ed McBain didn’t waste any words writing it, so it moves quickly. He milks Martha’s Vineyard for all the history and beauty that make it appealing to the people who spend their summers (or vacations) there.

The opening pages tell us that Martha’s Vineyard is where Zachary Blake’s wife drowned. A year later, Zach returns with his daughter Penny. His wife’s death sent Zach into a hole, caused him to give up his gig as a television broadcaster for the anonymity of a radio microphone, and Zach has no desire to revisit the memory. He feels compelled to return, however, after receiving a letter claiming that his wife’s death was not an accident.

From the moment of his arrival, it becomes clear that someone, or perhaps a group of people, would like Zach to leave. As he begins to probe the mystery more deeply, he stumbles across a murder and receives death threats. Clearly, his presence on the island is unwelcome, presumably because someone has something to hide. He eventually begins to suspect that he has stumbled into a conspiracy that has broader implications than a simple murder on Martha’s Vineyard.

Ed McBain sets up a traditional whodunit, providing plenty of suspects, while scattering clues to the mystery that Zach needs to unravel. The mystery isn’t particularly compelling and the ending is a little sappy, although it’s what readers wanted in 1958, when it was first published. I think it’s value for today’s reader lies in the setting and the turmoil that Zach undergoes as he tries to get to the bottom of his wife’s death.

Ed McBain wrote 141 books from 1952 to 2005 under eight different names, none of which he was born with. These include some of the best police procedural mysteries as well as many other excellent and influential books. As you might expect given the quantity, there are even more sloppy, thin pot boilers. This book belongs in the latter category. It's a novella length fragment without the plot necessary for a short story. It has more loose ends than woven threads. A bunch of random absurd stuff happens, the hero reacts completely irrationally, then the villain explains the entire plot for no reason at all. Even with the villain to explain everything the scheme makes no sense. Every character is a stereotype. The entire book reads as if it is pages cut from a longer novel that McBain didn't want to throw away.

The writing is competent, of course, and some of the scenes and dialog are worth reading. There is some interesting 1950s Martha's Vineyard color. Taken page by page it's a forgettable three-star mystery, but since the pages don't work together it falls to two stars. And even discounted to $7.99, it's overpriced for one hundred pages that seem to have been written in as many minutes.

One year after the accident, Zach Blake returns to Martha’s Vineyard with his nine-year-old daughter Penny. The death of Zach’s wife Mary was ruled an “accidental drowning” and the case was closed, leaving father and daughter to their grief. But something didn’t sit right with Zach; his wife was an expert swimmer, not someone inexperienced with ocean currents. That’s when the letter arrives, a terse message that reopens the old wound: Your wife Mary did not drown accident. That’s what drew Zach back to the island, the urge to find out the reason behind his wife’s death, a quest for the truth—and possibly vengeance. He’ll find an island with a dark, seedy underbelly, a multitude of suspects and motives, and lusty woman more than interested in him. Zach will only realize the danger he and his daughter are in when he finds the limp body of the letter’s author…

This one certainly has an intriguing setup, with Zach out to uncover the truth behind his wife’s death. That he brought his daughter along was an odd choice, but she’s an interesting if bland character rather than falling into a usual stereotype of a child, and the father-daughter dynamic works well to humanize Zach. (McBain always did have certain humanist elements in his works, so it shouldn’t be surprising.) Their investigation across the resort community of Martha’s Vineyard starts off well, proving the area a unique place to set a mystery; later on, the stakes are raised, Penny’s safety is threatened, and a panicked Zach finds himself ordered to leave the island but stuck there as he’s a person of interest in a murder investigation. The novel’s zippy pacing and continual stream of cliffhangers kept my attention.

My only complaint is how short the novel was, a slim 116 pages. It’s easy to breeze through in a night—I’m a fast reader and went through it in a couple of hours—but it leaves many elements left hanging, introduced and then written away in the next chapter. The relationship between Zach and femme fatale Enid felt like it moved at speed of plot since it certainly didn’t develop naturally; in the space of some 70 pages, they go from “she thinks I’m handsome” to “marry me.” (I expected a surprise reveal where her coming on to him was a distraction, right before she turned out to be the villain and tried to kill him, but alas, I guess love conquers all.) Most characters don’t have any time to develop, which is a shame, since we’re introduced to a bunch of interesting people (the lawyer, teenage hoods, and old sailor) who don’t really have much to do. And despite the paragraphs spent detailing his New York radio job, most of Zach’s non-wife backstory amounted to naught; nothing would have changed if he had been a tile-setter from Cleveland.

That said, I find it really hard to fault the novel. It’s the epitome of the beach read or airplane novel, a serviceable potboiler that fulfills its purpose and entertains for a few hours. The story zips along at a lightning pace, and Marsten’s prose is as sharp and strong as any other Hunter/McBain novel. This is pure pulp entertainment, drawing you in with an interesting mystery and characters, then hooking you when the chapters start to end on increasingly dire cliffhangers. The more of these I read, the more I start to see why the Richard Marsten alias was phased out—they aren’t the author’s best works, but I’ve yet to read anything “bad” by Hunter/McBain.

If you want a fast, taut thriller from the ’50s with a unique setting and characters, this one will definitely whet your appetite. I’m glad to see the novel is available again under McBain’s name, one of many now available as ebooks, and I’ll certainly buy more of them as they’re available.