The Third Deadly Sin

Description for THE THIRD DEADLY SIN by Lawrence Sanders:

New York at dusk. The working day is done, the bars fill up with revelers, and conventioneers pack the restaurants and hotels. Ordinary people go home, but the city comes alive with another breed: people on the make, thrill-seekers and thrill-givers, the lonely and the lustful, and among them one who wears a wig and high heels, and a gold charm bracelet which says WHY NOT?, and who carries a Swiss Army knife as sharp and lethal as a razor blade.

That deadliest and most elusive of criminals---the random killer---is at large in the hotel bars and lobbies of midtown New York, murdering without apparent motive, savagely, cruelly. Without publicity, the police hamstrung, yet they dare not divulge the emerging pattern to the media. So, out of reitrement, his lumbering body slowed by age but his brain still acute to the ways and wherefores of the criminal mentality, the NYPD calls the professional, Edward X. "Iron Balls" Delaney. Delaney is the quintessential officer of the law, the cop-of-cops, patient, smart, tenacious, unswerving once he has engaged his criminal adversary. But even as the evidence accumulates as the leads are pursued and the stakeouts deployed, the savage murders continue in a recognizable rhythm until Delaney can predict with precision the week in which the next one will occur. But which hotel will the killer choose? And who will die next?