The Dark Heart of Night

1937. Murder before breakfast. A beer and a beating for lunch. Just don't be late for dinner or a deadline. In the midst of their daily assignments covering murder and mayhem as well as the political machinations of LaGuardia's New York, Hugh McNeill, a young press photographer for the New York Daily Mirror has fallen in love with Cass Green, a crusading reporter for the same paper. While pursuing a serial killer and possible prostitute apparently doing away with her clients one by one, they probe the supposed suicide of a young lawyer fighting anti-Semitism. Their city editor, The Boss, tries at first to separate them and then, giving that up as a lost cause, throws them together for the chase. Cass's investigation of a high-end madam results in the attentions of a rogue mobster who has been moving in on the Lucky Luciano prostitution rackets and is now trying to kill her. An investigation of the German American Bund makes Cass a target of Nazi spies. Meanwhile, one after another, bodies continue to turn up, and Cass's relentless investigation leads her ever closer to the probable killer, a psychotic Stalinist attempting to eliminate Trotskyite traitors to the cause of the Comintern.