Ed McBain: Nocturne (USA 2013)

From the Publisher:
In Isola, the hours between midnight and dawn are usually a quiet time. But for the 87th Precinct detectives Carella and Hawes, the murder of an old woman makes the wee hours anything but peaceful -- especially when they learn she was one of the greatest concert pianists of the century long vanished. Meanwhile 88th Precinct cop Fat Ollie Weeks has his own early morning nightmare: he's on the trail of three prep school boys and a crack dealer who spent the evening carving up a hooker.

Ed McBain: Nocturne. An 87th Precinct Novel. Thomas & Mercer, ISBN: 9781477805589 (November, 2013), 320 p., $13.95.

Ed McBain: Nocturne (USA 1998)

From the Publisher:
87TH PRECINCT
They hear the music of the streets. The breaking glass and the breaking hearts. They whistle tunes from twenty years ago, and follow a haunting melody of lies, truths, and clues...

NOCTURNE
Someone played a little night music. What remained behind for the cops was the body of a woman who had once per-formed on the great stages of Europe, now with two bullets in her chest in the hallway of her apartment. For Carella and Hawes the long, dark night has just begun -- while somewhere in the city, another woman is dying for the price of a song...

"Packs a wallop.... McBain is one of the best in the business." -- PEOPLE
"ANOTHER GREAT YARN IN A MAGNIFICENT SERIES.... STUNNING: flawless dialogue, superb pacing, razor-sharp humor, and characters that make Bobby Simone and Andy Sipowicz of television's NYPD Blue look like cardboard cutouts." -- Associated Press

Ed McBain: Nocturne. 87th Precinct. Warner Books, ISBN: 0446605387 (April, 1998), 342 p., $6.99.

Ed McBain: Nocturne (UK 1997)

From the Publisher:
It's midnight in Isola, and the cops on the night shift at the 87th Precinct brace themselves for another week of terrifying violence. Two separate crimes are already underway.

Svetlana Helder is dead: just another old lady shot by a burglar. But Carella and Hawes think that there might be more to her story: burglars don't usually shoot the cat too.

Yolande Marie Marx isn't dead. But the crack-addicted hooker has just agreed to spend the night with three preppies called Richard: eighteen years old, smart as hell, drunk as skunks - and a lot more dangerous than they look.

The guilty are out there in the city, but not in the most obvious places. Carella and the other officers of the 87th follow the weapons, the witnesses and the dead ends through the sleeping streets of Isola....

Ed McBain: Nocturne. A Novel of the 87th Precinct. New English Library, ISBN: 0340695404 (November, 1997), 291 p., £5.99.

Ed McBain: Nocturne (UK 1997)

From the Publisher:
It's midnight in Isola, and the cops on the night shift at the 87th Precinct brace themselves for another week of terrifying violence. But two separate crimes, utterly unlike each other, are already underway.

Svetlana Helder's long, tragic life is over. Concert pianist, refugee, mother, she'd ended up being just another old lady living alone. Now she's been shot, her cat's been shot and the homicide detectives think she interrupted a burglar. Carella and Hawes disagree.

Elsewhere in the city, Yolande Marie Marx's short, tragic life is nearly over. Known on the street as Marie St Claire, she's been a hooker and a crack addict for long enough to know better than to party with more than one client, but she needs the money. The three preppies called Richard - eighteen years old, smart as hell and drunk as skunks - are unfortunately a lot more dangerous than they look.

The murderers are out there in the city, but not in the most obvious places.
Carella and the other officers of the 87th won't make their arrests until they have followed the weapons, the witnesses and the dead ends through some surprising parts of the sleeping city.

This is McBain at his most compelling. Unfolding his story entirely at night, intertwining two tales in which almost everyone involved is rotten, he weaves a virtuoso tapestry of murder, mayhem and retribution.

Ed McBain: Nocturne. A Novel of the 87th Precinct. Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN: 0340695390 (June, 1997), 291 p., £16.99.

Ed McBain: Nocturne (USA 1997)

From the Publisher:
Ed McBain's novels of crime and detection have made him the most admired and most imitated popular novelist of our time. The creator of the classic series of cops at work -- the 87th Precinct novels -- Mr. McBain continues to explore the turf that, in the words of the New York Times Book Review, "he owns." In his new novel, Ed McBain returns to the 87th, where with passion, razor-sharp literary skill, and characters marked by their originality and humanity, he tells a story as complex as a fugue and as elegant as a...
NOCTURNE

Once she had filled the concert halls of Europe with beautiful music. Once her name had been in headlines, her performances heralded in newspapers 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 body and two fatal gunshot wounds to her chest. Svetlana Dyalovich, found dead at midnight, was one more homicide in one more endless night in the city.

For detectives Carella and Hawes, no murder is ever routine, and while this one looks at first like a robbery, the evidence doesn't add up. And when Carella and Hawes interview Svetlana's hard-edged, lounge-singing granddaughter -- a woman accompanied by two armed bodyguards -- they start looking for a missing envelope full of money and for a killer who had more than robbery on his mind.

Like a concert grand under the hand of a virtuoso, NOCTURNE sounds a multitude of moods and notes -- from nightclubs to cockfights, from fish markets to crack deals, as witnesses are interviewed, a stolen gun is traced, and a police lab churns out microscopic evidence that sends the cops back out to the streets. And while the cops of the 87th use their skill and method, a melody of tragedy and chance unfolds. For in NOCTURNE only some victims are innocent, only some of the victimizers are criminals, and the final chord will resound long after the tale is told.

Ed McBain: Nocturne. A Novel of the 87th Precinct. Warner Books, ISBN: 0446518050 (May, 1997), 291 p., $24.00.