Since her husband Eddie's death in a boating accident eight months ago, Alice Glendenning has struggled to make ends meet while waiting for the insurance company to pay up. When Alice takes a job as a real estate agent, she makes a new friend, Charlie Hobbs from whom she is supposed to try to buy his waterfront land for a developer. Things quickly become a nightmare for Alice when her two children, Ashley and Jamie, aren't on the school bus home one...

On Halloween the quiet of the early evening is shattered by a series of sudden, violent incidents which take place during a shift at the 87th Precinct.

Once she had filled the concert halls of Europe with beautiful music. Once her name had been in headlines, her performances heralded in newspaper around the world. Now she lay dead on the cold floor of a cold apartment on the coldest night of the year: a little old woman with a shattered bottle of cheap liquor by her bady and two fatal gunshot wounds to her chest Svetlana Dyalovich, found dead at midnight, was one more homicide in one more endless...

Christmas Eve for the policemen at 87th Precinct

Eighty-seventh precinct detectives Carella and Hawes's investigation of the murder of Svetlana Dyalovich, a little old woman who once enjoyed international fame as a singer, leads them to the realization that the killer had more than robbery on his mind.

In this brilliant look at the music industry, the author once again combines his mastery of the form with the fast-paced dialogue and intricate plotting tht have become his signature.

Detective Steve Carella and the officers of the 87th Precinct work together to solve a series of murders.