Snow White and Rose Red

by Ed McBain

Book Overview

Sarah Whittaker is a green-eyed beauty with a love for Danny Kaye and white knights. Lawyer Matthew Hope can see all this clearly, despite the fact that whenever they meet the two are under constant surveillance by the mental institution staff. You see, Sarah's crazy...or is she? Sarah pleads with Matthew to take her case, claiming that her mother wrongfully had Sarah committed in order to seize her inheritance money. And while the mother and doctors...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0030026032
• ISBN13: 9780030026034
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

My First Matthew Hope

I am an avid fan of Stuart Kaminsky, John D. MacDonald, Cornell Woolrich, and Jim Thompson. Ed McBain fits in incredibly nicely with this amazing authors. I had read Ed McBain before - "Cop Hater" and his incredibly delightful retelling of the Christmas Story with the officers of the 87th precinct. As Evan Hunter, Ed McBain soars as the author of "The Blackboard Jungle." If you haven't seen the movie, you should. Anyway, I will digress... my point is that Ed McBain is a wonderful writer and not to be missed. This book features Matthew Hope, a Florida attorney, who is hired by Sarah Whittaker to get her out of an institution for the insane. The novel goes back and forth with Matthew believing that she is sane and perfectly normal, not to mention incredibly attractive, and utterly crazy. He tends to go toward the idea that she is normal, probably because she not only seems to know what is going on, but also because he would love to be involved romantically with her. Did I mention that she's due to inherit over a billion dollars? The plot twists and turns over the delusions that Sarah is supposed to possess and the discovery of a decomposing body in the swampy areas of the Florida coast. It seems for a long time that the two plots have nothing to do with one another. Or do they? Well, I won't spoil any plot points, but I do want to say that the final explanation is a wonderfully brilliant stream of consciousness (in my opinion, delivered in a much better way than Virginia Wolf) that was so eloquent that it will stay with me for years to come. I read somewhere that Evan Hunter didn't want to use his real name when writing mysteries because he didn't think the genre was "serious" enough, thus coming up with the pseudonymn Ed McBain. Well, he had nothing to be ashamed of... Matthew Hope is a hero for the ages, all the while maintaining the appeal of Travis McGee and Toby Peters-- real men characters.

Great read...

This is a pretty short novel featuring Matthew Hope as a lawyer who often ends up playing detective (also an older book... 1985). In this story, there are two plot lines going on. In the first, Hope is retained by a young lady who's been involuntarily committed to a mental institution. She seems very sane, and blames the situation on her mother who is trying to control a chunk of money she's inherited. In the other plot line (that seems totally unrelated), a pair of detectives find the body of a young lady in a swamp. She was shot in the throat and her tongue was cut out, and she's been there for six to nine months. As the two plots unfold, they start moving towards each other with a twist at the end... Good read.

Masterpiece

Probably the best of the Matthew Hope novels. Excellent plotting and characterizations. The cops, Bloom and Rawles, are wonderful, full dimensional characters. I love Matthew Hope's naivete, he's an unreliable narrator who has a "hope"ful view of humanity, unlike McBain himself, or whatever his name is. This one's great!