Jack and the Beanstalk

Jack McKinney is a bright-eyed twenty-year-old in the business of
buying a snapbean farm with forty grand in cash, and attorney Matthew
Hope assists with the deal-until Jack’s found dead in his condo,
stabbed fourteen times. The backwoods seller wants his forty grand pronto, but nobody
can find the cash. And when Matthew pays a visit to the McKinney ranch,
he gets more than he bargained for. Jack’s mother, Veronica, is a woman
who looks half her years, with cool gray eyes to match her ambivalent
attitude toward her son’s death. The only thing more dangerous than
Veronica is daughter Sunny, the mirror image of her mother and a girl
who can hold her liquor. Everyone seems to have a theory about the
missing money, but Matthew’s the only one who can get to the bottom of
the bum deal. The fourth installment of Ed McBain’s Matthew Hope Mysteries,
Jack and the Beanstalk delivers our lawyer into a world of seedy
folks, sour deals, and a family gone afoul.