In a Week of No Ordinary Crimes, the Nanny Case Reverberates Looking out from an apartment at 57 West 75th Street, where a nanny is accused of stabbing two children to death. In the spring of last year, over the course of five days, several burglaries occurred in Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood so untouched by disruptive incident that about the same time, I found a lost billfold in front of a brownstone; it had managed to spend the entire night on the stoop unmolested. As I learned when I opened it, the wallet, containing a credit card and about $60, belonged to the teenage son of my real estate broker. Big City Book Club In conjunction with the revival of "The Heiress," opening on Broadway on Nov. 1 and starring Dan Stevens of "Downton Abbey" and Jessica Chastain of "The Help," the Big City Book Club will be reading Henry James's "Washington Square," the 1880 novel on which the 1947 play is based. James's short, potent novel about a wealthy doctor, his plain daughter and the young man of highly dubious ambitions who comes between them is a classic tale of New York social climbing. The story is "true" in the general sense but also in the particulars as it was recounted to James by a friend, a British actress. We will soon announce the date and time of our live discussion (and the co-host). To become a member of the Book Club and to receive updates about future chats, send an e-mail, subject line "Join," to bigcity@nytimes.com. Police officers in Queens, where a man accused of shooting a Nassau County officer and a motorist was caught. It was within this Mayberry context that one was not surprised to learn that none of the burglaries in the neighborhood had resulted from forced entry. All four had occurred because residents had left their doors and windows unlocked or open while they were out. For the fortunate, at least, this was life in postmillennial New York, a place where prosperity has evolved into its own far-reaching faith. And so it has remained, in some sense naïvely. Last month, a woman left the front door to her apartment unlocked in a doorman-tended building on West 61st and was raped after, the authorities said, a pizza delivery boy who had dropped something off wandered around checking doorknobs until he found an apartment he could enter easily. Lurid and horrific things happen in New York City all the time, as we were reminded by last week's baroquely macabre news cycle. It included but was not limited to what officials described as an ex-convict's fatal shooting of a Nassau County police officer and a motorist; a seemingly bullied teenager's suicide on Staten Island; the arrest of a New York City police officer who the F.B.I. said planned to abduct women and then rape, cook and eat them; the apparent murder of a mother and child in the Bronx; and, most discussed and agonized over of all, an Upper West Side mother's discovery that, according to the authorities, her nanny had killed two of her children before slashing her own neck and wrists. In an ordinary week, any of these stories might have dominated the local news. But the case of the nanny, in which a motive seemed entirely unclear, swept the others away. That story in all of its inconceivably tragic detail - the mother, Marina Krim, had kept an adoring blog of her three children's development and celebrations - quickly became a vessel for the unleashing of our parental anxieties. The predictable online debates erupted: over the necessity of nannies, the complexities of relationships with them and so on. Judgments were made of parents who enlist help, and were disputed. "All you ladies who put your career and money above your children, this is what can happen," went a typical strain of commentary, though it was uncertain if Ms. Krim worked or not. Little has changed since 1997, when the trial in Massachusetts of the au pair Louise Woodward, who was accused of shaking a baby to death, elicited the same kinds of intense disapproval of outsourced child care. Our fears about our children's well-being are so culturally paramount that it can seem, at times, as though little else penetrates. So complacent are we about so much else involving city life that the story of the woman raped in her own ostensibly secure home barely reached the radar of affluent New Yorkers, for whom such a narrative in, say, 1976 might have turned into an obsession. It is often said that the abduction of Etan Patz in 1979 served as a powerful catalyst for ushering in the era of vigilant parenting that we now inhabit. But it eventually changed something else, too, the focus of tabloid news. It is virtually impossible now to watch local programming in New York or pick up The New York Post or The Daily News and not come upon a story of a ghastly crime visited upon a child. Every day we are besieged by accounts of babies abandoned in Dumpsters, children beaten and molested, teachers - male teachers, female teachers - abusing their charges. The story of Leiby Kletzky, the little boy in Borough Park, Brooklyn, who suffered the unfathomable and entirely unlikely destiny of being abducted and murdered during his first-ever walk home on his own, consumed the news cycle for days. The entertainment media have piggybacked, offering in something like "Law & Order: SVU" a vision of New York in which no child would ever seem safe from barbarous predation. The crimes that receive the most attention, the most poring over, reflect the preoccupations of their particular age. In the "60s and "70s, we worried about the fate of single women, about a new and precarious world of sexual adventure, and our fears were fed by the Kitty Genovese murder and the Son of Sam killings and "Looking for Mr. Goodbar." The story of Marina Krim - the picture of her screaming in terror behind an ambulance window as she is taken to the hospital after learning what happened - will live with us, by instinct or design, longer than we know.