Lullaby by Ed McBain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"One of the ambulance attendants walked over to where Hodding still had his arm around his wife.
'Leave the knife in her or what?' he asked Carella.
Which was when Mrs. Hodding began screaming."

Another strong entry in the 87th Precinct series. Ed McBain's Lullaby (1989) has a captivating plot and several interesting characters; the denouement is close to plausible - a rarity in the crime novels genre.

New Year's Day, early morning. Detectives Carella and Meyer catch the case of a double murder: a young babysitter stabbed to death and a baby smothered with a pillow. The baby's parents come back from the New Year's party and find the bodies. The detectives quickly find out that the case might be connected to a residential burglary, which occurred in the same building the day before.

The two threads - murder and burglary - are accompanied by two other stories unfolding in parallel. Detective Kling saves the life of a small crook who is being viciously beaten by three thugs and is rewarded by getting information about a major drug shipment to arrive. The author also offers interesting accounts of psychotherapy sessions for cops suffering a nervous breakdown or job burnout. The four threads continue throughout the plot, with the murder thread getting a particularly plausible and logical conclusion.

There is some strong writing in the novel. From this sad passage

"'Yes?' he said again.
And with that single word, identical to all the yesses he'd already said, Carella knew for certain that the man already knew, the man was bracing himself for the words he knew would come, using the 'Yes?' as a shield to protect himself from the horror of those words, to deflect those words, to render them harmless."

to the scene of a savage killing, so cruel that I found it very hard to read.

In several places, the author inserts biting social commentary as a background for the plot. I find it stunning that while the novel was written only 32 years ago, the compassionate and well-meant remarks would be deemed totally inappropriate today, simply because of the language. I much prefer the language of the past, crude and potentially offensive, yet devoid of circumlocutions and euphemisms, thus better conveying the hard truths. The novel is well worth reading even if just for emphasizing how much the acceptable language has changed over the third of a century.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.

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