Ed McBain: There Was a Little Girl (USA 2012)

From the Publisher:
Roger Broome is in the city to sell the woodenwares he and his brother handcrafted in their shop upstate -- and he does so with stunning success. To celebrate, he goes out to enjoy the fruits of his labor and winds up in a bar, where he meets Molly. They have a few drinks and then head back to his room.

Now Molly is dead, and only Roger knows what happened.
The men at the 87th would surely love to get that information from Roger... if they even knew he had it. While Roger wants to report what he knows to the detectives, he struggles to reach out to them when a Spanish beauty named Amelia makes him forget everything else in his life. And with each missed opportunity, Roger delays justice from being served.

One of the 87th Precinct series' more gripping and psychologically intense installments, There Was a Little Girl is bestselling author Ed McBain at his finest as he delivers a brooding, suspenseful thriller Newsday hails as "a tour de force!"

Ed McBain: There Was a Little Girl. A Matthew Hope Mystery. Thomas & Mercer, ISBN: 9781612189901 (October, 2012), eBook, 1109 KB (ca. 424 p.), $3.99.

Ed McBain: There Was a Little Girl (USA 1995)

From the Publisher:
There was a little girl who had a little girl who had a little girl
The only man who can unravel that riddle is lying in a Florida hospital, battling for his life after being gunned down outside a Calusa bar. Now Matthew Hope's best friends are fanning out into the heat, retracing his footsteps, desperately trying to discover who wanted him dead. They find pieces of a baffling puzzle: a circus teeming with animal trainers, freaks, and carnal knowledge; a curvacious three-foot woman who died a brutal death; a big Florida land deal. How do they fit together? His mind flickering in and out of consciousness, Matthew Hope knows the answer. So does a killer-waiting for him to live, or die.

"SUPERB." -- Associated Press
"McBAIN DOES IT AGAIN! A BRILLIANT PIECE OF WRITING... AND YOU WON'T PUT IT DOWN." -- Larry King, USA Today

Ed McBain: There Was a Little Girl. Warner Books, ISBN: 0446602140 (October, 1995), 323 p., $6.50.

Ed McBain: There Was a Little Girl (UK 1995)

From the Publisher:
'Bang. Bang.
'Two shots and two sentences into Ed McBain's latest Matthew Hope mystery, and Mr McBain's lawyer-sleuth hero is out of commission, leaving his friends and colleagues to find out why he has landed comatose in a Florida hospital bed.

'There Was a Little Girl is as dazzling as the fast-paced, lavishly produced circus it describes... amazingly accomplished.' -- New York Times
'A gamy gaudy plot, brilliantly engineered and executed.' -- Literary Review
'The circus comes over with terrific pungency and there is a powerful three-ring intrigue to match it. McBain maintains suspense to the very last words.' -- The Sunday Times
'This is the best Matthew Hope so far, with much interesting detail on circuses, a complex narrative machined with great precision and a total lack of sentimentality.' -- Evening Standard

Don't miss Ed McBain's other exciting Matthew Hope novels! Coronet publishes Rumpelstiltskin, Goldilocks and Beauty and the Beast. His brilliant 87th Precinct novels include Mischief, Shotgun, Jisgaw, Hail, Hail the Gang's All Here! and See Them Die, all available from Coronet Books.

Ed McBain: There Was a Little Girl. A Matthew Hope Novel. Coronet, ISBN: 0340639644 (September, 1995), 304 p., £5.99.

Ed McBain: There Was a Little Girl (UK 1994)

From the Publisher:
Ed McBain's brilliant detective Matthew Hope - last seen in Mary, Mary - returns in his eleventh dazzling mystery, set once again in Calusa, Florida, against the exotic background of the American circuses that make their headquarters there.

This time, though, Hope has a major handicap. He's been shot, twice, and he's lying unconscious in the intensive care ward of the local hospital. As the women in his life gather at the bedside, Matthew Hope's colleagues and the police investigating the shooting frantically trace his movements in the week before he stepped outside the Centaur Bar and Grill in Calusa's black ghetto.

Like Hope, they are soon picking their way through a story of violence and greed and betrayal with its roots reaching back over the years. The Steadman and Roeger Circus-its owners, its performers, its hangers-on-conceals part of the story behind the murder attempt, and Calusa's black community, too, holds pieces of the puzzle.

Was Matthew Hope on the verge of unmasking a murderer who got away with it-or something even more shocking?

There Was a Little Girl, with its fully-realized characters and its fascinating circus background, is one of the best novels that even grand master McBain has ever written.

Ed McBain: There Was a Little Girl. A Matthew Hope Novel. Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN: 0340598867 (November, 1994), 292 p., £15.99.

Ed McBain: There Was a Little Girl (USA 1994)

From the Publisher:
"Ed McBain is a master. He is a superior stylist, a spinner of artfully designed and sometimes macabre plots." -- Newsweek
THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL
Ed McBain, the legend of contemporary suspense, returns to Calusa, Florida, in a novel that weaves multiple points of view into a tantalizing, brilliant plot.

Matthew Hope has been shot -- taking two bullets outside a bar in Calusa's seediest neighborhood. With Matthew in a postsurgery semicoma, the men and women who know him best go to the places he went, talk to the people he talked to, and desperately try to find out who wanted Matthew Hope dead. The sexy, tough investigator called Toots Kiley, the world-weary cop named Monis Bloom, and Warren Chambers, a strong black man who gets reminded nded every day that Florida is still the Deep South, start to get the picture: Matthew Hope had walked into a weird and wild world.

Hope had been hired to close a real estate deal for a small, successful circus. He found himself surrounded by trapeze artists, wild animal trainers, seductive dancers, and freaks who shared a society of amazing feats, kinky sex, and dark secrets. Before Hope could do his job he had to find out how a curvacious three-foot-tall woman met a violent death, and what happened to her extensive estate.

Instead of an answer, Hope got a riddle. Now in a Calusa hospital, he fights for his life. His friends scramble for clues. But the riddle and a killer are still out there: There was a little girl who had a little girl who had a little girl...

Ed McBain: There Was a Little Girl. Warner Books, ISBN: 0446517399 (October, 1994), 323 p., $21.95.