Who are you, Malone? Just a little while ago you were a cop. That was before the two punks and their girl hit town. That was before they boosted a payroll and shot down a man and took your 9-year-old daughter as insurance to cover their getaway. Now you're just a man. Scared. Not for yourself--that would be easy. But for your child, the only thing in the world you love enough to make you play ball with the kind of scum you've hated all your life. Except that you're one of them now. You've crossed the line no cop can ever cross. And there's just one desperate way of getting back. 

Furia backed his way out. At the door he said, "Remember, cop, that's your kid we got. So don't be a hero." And he was gone. They were left alone with the black bag.
Then Ellen whirled and said in a voice filled with hate, "You great big policeman you. You cowardly son-of-a-bitch, you let them take my Bibby away. You let them!" and she was punching his chest and sobbing and he put his arms around her and said in a hoarseness of baffled rage, "Ellen, they won't hurt her, I'll kill them, they want that money more than anything, don't cry, Ellen, I'll get her back"

A hard-boiled crime story, not a mystery in any sense. Lee insisted it was not ghost-written. It was long suspected as one of their farmed-out paperback originals that they thought could make it as a hardcover. Dannay himself confirmed this in person to Francis Nevins.s
For this book Lee did research by riding along at night with a New Milford (Connecticut) policepatrol, this certainly paid off as this was one of the more authentic books for some time.