Ann Cantor once again does excellent brushwork, this time with a sinister cover for Avon Publications and the 1949 novel Night Cry by William Stuart. We talked about this one a while back. It's the story of a cop who kills a suspect, does to the body what you see in the art, then struggles to keep proof of his crime concealed. It's an atmospheric tale capped with an unexpected ending. We haven't watched the movie based on it, the 1950 film noir Where the Sidewalk Ends, but we'll get to it. See more art from Cantor here and here,

Night Cry is a thriller about a cop who accidentally kills a murder suspect and covers it up by dumping the body in a river. For a cruel guy like him it's not a big deal, until he learns the suspect was innocent. That'll fray the nerves of even the meanest cop a bit. He continues trying to pin the original murder on the presumed-missing-but-actually-dead man, but then the body is found. Whoops. The fact that he ever thought the dead man was just missing starts to look borderline incompetent to his colleagues, but there’s more—the beautiful girlfriend of the deceased now becomes everyone’s prime suspect. We liked this book, so we weren't surprised to learn that it's highly regarded. It inspired the movie Where The Sidewalk Ends, directed by Otto Preminger. The 1954 Avon paperback front above followed an earlier version from 1949, and the art is uncredited.