Ed McBain: Snow White and Rose Red (USA 2012)

From the Publisher:
Sarah Whittaker is a green-eyed beauty with a love for Danny Kaye and white knights. Lawyer Matthew Hope can see all this clearly, despite the fact that whenever they meet the two are under constant surveillance by the mental institution staff. You see, Sarah's crazy... or is she? Sarah pleads with Matthew to take her case, claiming that her mother wrongfully had Sarah committed in order to seize her inheritance money. And while the mother and doctors in question seem shady, almost cloying in their belief that Sarah is a paranoid schizophrenic, Matthew can't tell day from night, or Rose Red from Snow White. Meanwhile, the corpse of a woman about Sarah's age washes ashore in a town nearby. Is there a connection? Is Sarah Whittaker really pure as snow? Is she the Virgin Queen she says she is? It's up to Matthew to find out.

In Ed McBain's Snow White and Rose Red, Matthew Hope plunges into the noir, twisted world of the most complicated of mysteries -- the human mind.

Ed McBain: Snow White and Rose Red. A Matthew Hope Mystery. Thomas & Mercer, ISBN: 9781612181981 (October, 2012), 263 p., $13.95.

Ed McBain: Snow White & Rose Red (USA 1994)

From the Publisher:
KISS OF DEATH
Matthew Hope believed Sarah Whittaker was sane. He believed her claims that her mother and two well-paid psy-chiatrists had schemed to commit her, and that the reason was money. But when Hope set out to have Sarah released, he didn't know that the decayed body of a once beautiful girl was being fished from the Sawgrass River. And he didn't know about the girl's life and times as a stripper, or the secret payments she got from Connecticut. For Matthew Hope, attorney, it would take a dizzying tour through a world of topless dancers, call girls, and sexual psychosis to come up against an astounding link between the dead girl and blond, vivacious Sarah Whittaker-who was either a real-life sleeping beauty or a time bomb waiting to go off...

"HEART-STOPPING." -- Chicago Sun-Times
"THE MATTHEW HOPE NOVELS DO FOR THE WORLD OF FLORIDA SLEAZE WHAT THE 87TH PRECINCT BOOKS DO FOR BIG-CITY VICE. THE READER IS HOOKED AND GIVEN NOT A MOMENT'S LETUP." -- New York Times Book Review

Ed McBain: Snow White & Rose Red. Warner Books, ISBN: 0446601330 (May, 1994), 248 p., $5.99.

Ed McBain: Snow White & Rose Red (USA 1986)

From the Publisher:
THE DAMSEL IN DISTRESS
Sarah Whittaker, said her attorney, was nuttier than a fruitcake. When Matthew Hope visited her in the institution he was half-expecting some shaven-headed basket case in a uniform that looked like mattress ticking.

Instead Sarah Whittaker was wearing a wheat-coloured linen suit and a saffron silk blouse open at the throat. She had a generous mouth and eyes as green as the Amazon jungle and Matthew Hope fell in love with her on the spot.

'So why are you here?' he asked. 'Ah,' she said, and started to tell him a story. And it certainly wasn't the kind of tale a mother would read to her children at bedtime...

Also by Ed McBain in Sphere Books: JACK AND THE BEANSTALK

Ed McBain: Snow White & Rose Red. A Matthew Hope Mystery. London: Sphere Books, 1986, ISBN: 0722157266, 247 p., £2.95.

Ed McBain: Snow White & Rose Red (USA 1985)

From the Publisher:
Shimmering blonde hair framing an exquisite pale pale face. Deep green eyes, a generous mouth. Matthew Hope took one look and fell in stantly in love.

Sarah Whittaker had everything: stunning good looks, youth, money, social standing. Everything, that is, but her freedom. Because Sarah Whittaker was currently residing, against her inclinations and her will, in Knott's Retreat -- familiarly known to the residents of Florida's booming West Coast as Nut's Retreat. In the State of Florida, County of Calusa, Sarah Whit taker was a certified paranoid schizo phrenic. That's what the doctors said. It's what her widowed mother said. It's what the court-ordered psychiatric commitment papers said. It was not what Sarah Whittaker said -- and that was why she had called Matthew Hope. Would he, she asked, act as her attorney and fight for her freedom -- not to mention fighting for the $650,000 left her by her father and now controlled by her mother.

Hope might have lost his heart, but he hadn't lost his wits. He probed Sarah's story of a mother driven by hate to con fine her only child to a mental institution and decided she was telling the truth. He took the case.

And in so doing was led into a hall of mirrors in which reality and delusion blurred into murder, mutilation, and the greatest danger Hope had ever known.

Snow White and Rose Red is the fifth in Ed McBain's much acclaimed series featuring the young, successful, and divorced Matthew Hope, an attorney who practices in the Florida Gulf City of Calusa. Ed McBain is also the author of the 87th Precinct series.

Ed McBain: Snow White & Rose Red. A Matthew Hope Novel. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ISBN: 0030026032 (March, 1985), 248 p., $14.95.