Cop Hater

⚖The case for it

The first 87th Precinct novel, launching the most important police procedural series in American fiction. McBain's "Isola" (New York) precinct detectives investigate crimes across a city rendered with documentary precision. McBain created the template for every TV police procedural that followed, from Hill Street Blues to The Wire.

— the canon

✕The case against

Template is the right word, and templates show their age. Women here exist as wives, victims, or anatomy the narrator appraises; the killer's motive is a groaner by modern standards; the heat-wave prose repeats itself like a sweaty refrain. Historically important, briskly readable, and thinner than the thousand shows it spawned would suggest.

— the honest librarian