Edgar Award Finalist: Hailed by Mary Higgins Clark as “one of the best mystery-suspense writers,” Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis presents a spellbinding tale of passion and deadly deceit that begins with a dying man’s mysterious last words.
Father McMahon is struggling to write a sermon when a boy runs into his office. A man in his tenement is dying, the boy says, and it is too late for a doctor or the police. In the basement of the apartment house, Father McMahon kneels beside the blood-soaked man, who has been stabbed with a knife. The man asks for no absolution. He wants to talk of life, not death, and takes to his grave the identity of his killer—and his own.
No one in the neighborhood—not his lover or his friends—knows the man’s real name, where he came from, or why someone would want to kill him. But in his final minutes, he reveals one clue that sends Father McMahon, a cop, and a wealthy young woman down New York’s dark streets, where a killer is waiting to strike again.