by Ed McBain

What could be easier? He had a confessed killer, clear fingerprints, and a witness. Everything was sewed up tight. Or was it Detective Steve Carella could not forget Gerald Fletcher standing beside the body of his beautiful wife, Sarah, announcing how glad he was that someone had stabbed her. And when Fletcher kept wining and dining him, flattering and heckling him, tossing him clue after clue, Carella could sniff that there was more to Sarah's death than just bungled burglary. When Sarah's little black book turned up a mile-long record of her nocturnal adventures, Carella knew it was time to call in the boys of the 87th, to find out why everyone was calling her Sadie when she died.