Once she had filled the concert halls of Europe with beautiful music. Once her name had been in headlines, her performances heralded in newspapers around the world. Now she lay dead on the cold floor of a cold apartment on the coldest night of the year: a little old woman with a shattered bottle of cheap liquor by her body and two fatal gunshot wounds to her chest. Svetlana Dyalovich, found dead at midnight, was one more homicide in one more endless night in the city. For detectives Carella and Hawes, no murder is ever routine, and while this one looks at first like a robbery, the evidence doesn't add up. And when Carella and Hawes interview Svetlana's hard-edged, lounge-singing granddaughter - a woman accompanied by two armed bodyguards - they start looking for a missing envelope full of money and for a killer who had more than robbery on his mind.