UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · POLICE
Evan Hunter
Also known as: Ed Mcbain, Ed McBain
Born Salvatore Albert Lombino, he legally adopted the name Evan Hunter in 1952. While successful and well known as Evan Hunter, he was even better known as Ed McBain, a name he used for most of his crime fiction, beginning in 1956.
BOTH DETECTIVES had children of their own.
— from Lullaby, 1989
Most acclaimed
The 50 Greatest Mysteries of All Time
[Purloined Letter]( / Edgar Allan Poe A terribly strange bed / Wilkie Collins The three strangers / Thomas Hardy T[he red-headed league]( / Arthur Conan Doyle The corpus delecti / Melville Davisson Post Gentlemen and players / E.W. Hornung A journey / Edith Wharton The leopard man's story / Jack London A retrieved reformation / O. Henry The problem of Cell 13 / Jacques Futrelle The absent-minded coterie / Robert Barr The invisible man / G.K. Chesterton The infallible Godahl / Frederick Irving Anderson The adventure of the unique "Hamlet" / Vincent Starrett The Gioconda smile / Aldous Huxley Haircut / Ring Lardner The killers / Ernest Hemingway The hands of Mr. Ottermole / Thomas Burke The little house at Croix-Rousse / Georges Simenon The case of the missing patriarchs / Logan Clendening Clerical error / James Gould Cozzens The two bottles of relish / Lord Dunsany The chaser / John Collier The perfect crime / Ben Ray Redman Yours truly, Jack the Ripper / Robert Bloch The blind spot / Barry Perowne The catbird seat / James Thurber Recipe for murder / C.P. Donnel Jr. The nine mile walk / Harry Kemelman Kill or be killed / Ogden Nash The specialty of the house / Stanley Ellin Nearly perfect / A.A. Milne The Gettysburg Bugle / Ellery Queen The last spin / Evan Hunter Stand up and die! / Mickey Spillane A new leaf / Jack Ritchie The snail-watcher / Patricia Highsmith The long way down / Edward D. Hoch The man who never told a lie / Isaac Asimov I have / John Gardner [Quitters, Inc.]( / Stephen King Horn man / Clark Howard The new girl friend / Ruth Rendell By the dawn's early light / Lawrence Block Iris / Stephen Greenleaf High Darktown / James Ellroy The Pietro Andromache / Sara Paretsky Soft monkey / Harlan Ellison The hand of Carlos / Charles McCarry Karen makes out / Elmore Leonard
Lullaby
1989
"Carl Streator is a solitary widower and fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation, he discovers an ominous thread: the presence on the scenes of these deaths of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, opened to the page where there appears an African chant or "culling song." This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction - and once it lodges in Streator's brain, he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle, who specializes in selling haunted (or "distressed") houses (wonderfully high turnover), and who lost a child to the culling song years before. Together they set out on a cross-country odyssey. Their goal is to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on their road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend, Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family."--BOOK JACKET.
Strangers When We Meet
Larry Cole has everything a man could want. He loves his wife, Eve, and is devoted to their two small sons. His career as an architect is both creatively satisfying and financially rewarding. His house in suburban Pinecrest Manor is attractive and comfortable. But then Larry sees a new neighbor standing at the school bus stop. Margaret Gault is young, blond, beautiful—and married. She’s everything Larry didn’t realize was missing from his life, and he must have her. Maggie tells Larry she’s never been in love. But this isn’t about love. It’s about need and desire. Touch and taste and risk. And lies. Larry and Maggie surrender to lust, knowing their secret motel rendezvous and lunch-hour trysts will amount to nothing; they will always be strangers to each other. But actions have consequences. And sometimes consequences can be deadly. Author Evan Hunter adapted his riveting novel of infidelity into a film starring Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak. A torrid tale of sexual compulsion and the secrets lurking beneath the most placid of surfaces, Strangers When We Meet is an early masterpiece from the creator of the bestselling 87th Precinct series.