Beauty and the Beast - Ed McBain

Matthew Hope is a divorce lawyer in the town of Calusa, Florida, where the Gulf waters are warm and the women on the beach topless. One such woman, Michelle Benois Harper--a striking beauty with cascading black hair--enters Matthew's office revealing swollen eyes and a bruised and battered body. After making a statement with the cops saying her husband did it, her body is found on the beach, burned beyond recognition.

George N. Harper is a hulking man with pockmarks, flaring nostrils, and rheumy eyes--the ugliest accused man Matthew has ever seen. But something's not quite right about the case--Harper loved his wife. Yet the cops and lawyers are ready to hang the man who could extinguish such a beautiful woman, and it's up to Matthew to prove his innocence.

An instant classic in the Matthew Hope series from Ed McBain, Beauty and the Beast pairs the good-hearted lawyer with a client who tests his prejudices and proves beauty may be skin deep, but ugly is in the bones.