New Year’s Day brings the dawn of a new year and the hope of better days to come. But for a couple who returns home from a New Year’s Eve party in the early morning hours to find their babysitter and child murdered, that hope is suddenly, brutally gone. For Detectives Carella and Meyer, the sight of the crime scene hits with magnum force, their own children at home safe in their beds.

Detective Kling rings in the New Year with an investigation into drug trafficking that erupts into a deadly turf war among rival gangs. They will stop at nothing to kill each other to achieve supremacy—and even kill a detective in the bargain.

The fortieth installment in what iconic writer Stephen King calls “inarguably the best series of police procedural novels ever written,” Lullaby is Ed McBain at his groundbreaking best.