Sally
Frank Gonzalez, a tough, darkly handsome cop first sees Sally on his way to work. Her face seems dull, flat, frightened. Then, suddenly, she runs and when Gonzalez catches her he knows that he is right, that she is filled with a stupefying fear. Finally the voice comes. "What," she asks, "are you going to do with me?"
So begins a day of terror for Sally Dillman, a lovely young schoolteacher, who has mistaken Detective Gonzalez for an unknown assassin she hired to commit murder, her own. For Detective Gonzalez who works out of New York City's 19th Precinct it is the start of a deadly duel with a crazed, professional gunman. Gonzalez knows that the anonymous killer will not rest until he has fulfilled his contract to murder Sally, who now desperately wants to live.
For Sally and Gonzalez, alien to each other and the city that has brought them together, this day is invested not only with fear but with a searching, growing love. Sally, who comes from a small town in New York State, is white, Presbyterian, helpless and alone. Gonzalez, a man of deep warmth and anger, proudly Puerto Rican, Catholic, still views himself as an outsider in the brutal jungle that reared him. As the day progresses, Gonzalez, the cop, must use the woman he has come to love as human bait to draw out the killer and destroy him. The denouement is inexorable and chilling.
In this swift-paced, warmly moving novel, E.V. Cunningham, the creator of a gallery of fascinating women, changes pace from the light to the serious to bring you one of his most fascinating tales.
from the dust jacket of the 1967 William Morrow first edition
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