She was young, wealthy - and dead. Strangled to death in a slum apartment. All they had to go on was her name and some cancelled cheques. As Steve Carella said, 'Those cheques are the diary of her life. We'll find the answer there.' But how was he to know that they would reveal something much stranger than murder? On Passover the rabbi bled to death. Someone had brutally stabbed him and painted a J on the synagogue wall. Everyone knew who the killer was - it had to be Finch, the Jew-hater. Or did it...? The snow was pure white except where Cotton Hawes stared down at the bright red pool of blood spreading away from the dead girl's body. Hawes was supposed to be on a skiing holiday, but he couldn't just stand by and watch the local cops make a mess of the case. He had to catch the ski-slope slayer before he killed again.
A New York Times Bestselling AuthorThe first thing Detectives Steve Carella and Bert Kling saw was four bodies soaked in blood. Then Kling realized that one of those crumpled on the bookshop floor was Claire Townsend, his fiancie! And that's when the bookstore massacre stopped being just another murder case to the boys of the 87th Precinct. For Bert Kling was one of their own, and no one could get away with blasting a policeman's girl.
It s like an old-time gangster movie: a speeding car, a blazing gun and suddenly a guy walking down the street without a care in the world is lying in the gutter without a head on his shoulders. But who pulled the high-powered trigger that turned Sy Kramer from a blackmailer into a chalk outline? Was it the politician s wife with a pornographic past? The soda-pop tycoon desperate to keep a business-busting bungle bottled up? Or was it whoever was paying Kramer a small fortune to hide what must ve been one very big bad? It falls to detectives Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes of the 87th Precinct to pound the pavement of the city and beat the bushes of the backwoods for the suspect with the best motive, the most blistering weapon, and the biggest set of brass ones. En route, they ll meet pretty ladies and petty lowlifes, great white hunters and gray flannel ad execs, and, when the going gets rough, maybe even their match. It s all in several long days and even longer nights work for the guys who make their living behind the badge, and under the gun."