From the author who wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's THE BIRDS

For the first time Evan Hunter and Ed McBain, two extraordinary and diverse talents, fuse to form a brilliant and powerful novel of two halves

'That it works so superbly is a tribute to the skills of this great storyteller' NEW YORK TIMES

Benjamin Thorpe is married, a father, a successful Los Angeles architect - and a man obsessed. Alone in New York City on business, he spends the empty hours of the night in a compulsive search for female companionship. His dizzying descent leads to an early morning confrontation in a mid-town brothel, and a subsequent searing self-revelation.

Cathy Frese - aka Heidi-the-teenage-hooker - finishes up for the night and walks back to her studio apartment. But she never arrives. Her strangled, used and mutilated body is found in an alleyway the next morning.

These two lost souls had crossed briefly in the night, and as the foggy events of the night before come into sharper focus, Benjamin Thorpe becomes an ever more possible suspect...