87th Precinct Mysteries (Thorndike)
2 total works
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.
Gloria Stanford was very sexy, very rich and very, very dead. Found in her plush, city apartment, she had been shot twice in the heart. All her credit cards and i.d. were gone but apart from that there seemed no motive at all. It's only when the detective-in-charge, Steve Carella, starts to receive bizarre cryptic notes through the mail that he realises that something bigger than a simple homicide is going on. For it seems the 'Deaf Man' is back - a notorious crook and killer who has a morbid fascination with puzzles and anagrams. Long thought dead, he's back on the loose and wants his long-hidden millions back...Thus begins a roller-coaster ride of betrayal, double-bluff and violence with an enormous golden haul at the end of it...