Thomas and I arrived at Kensington an hour late. A maid let us in, our shoes clacking against the polished wooden floor as we stepped inside. Down the hall I heard laughter coming from Andrew’s party. “Do you think Andrew’s mother will be here?” I asked, scanning the wide foyer as if she might leap Read more
ELEANOR WEST WAS FOND of saying—inasmuch as she was fond of saying anything predictable, sensible, or more than once—that her school had no graduates, only students who found somewhere else to do their learning for a time. Once a wayward child, always a wayward child. The school’s doors would always be open; the lost and Read more
Bosch arrived late and had to park on a cemetery lane far from the grave site. Careful not to step on anybody’s grave, he limped through two memorial sections, his cane sinking into the soft ground, until he saw the gathering for John Jack Thompson. It was standing room only around the old detective’s grave Read more
Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell. She’s still wearing her school uniform, but she’s taken off the sweater, so it’s just the blouse and skirt, and she has no shoes on, only tights. Oh, hey, he says. Come on in. She turns and walks down the hall. He follows her, closing the Read more
Toby Fleishman awoke one morning inside the city he’d lived in all his adult life and which was suddenly somehow now crawling with women who wanted him. Not just any women, but women who were self-actualized and independent and knew what they wanted. Women who weren’t needy or insecure or self-doubting, like the long-ago prospects Read more
Anathema Device—her mother, who was not a great student of religious matters, happened to read the word one day and thought it was a lovely name for a girl—was eight and a half years old, and she was reading The Book, under the bedclothes, with a torch. Other children learned to read on basic Read more
he sat at her desk. It was a fine afternoon, but the cold sunshine beyond her office window oppressed her. In younger days, she might have ventured out, hoping against reason for warmth. Hope against reason: an opiate she’d long abandoned. Slowly she sifted the volumes on her desk. A dusty bilingual edition of Usque’s Read more
GWENDA WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, but she was not afraid of the dark. When she opened her eyes she could see nothing, but that was not what scared her. She knew where she was. She was at Kingsbridge Priory, in the long stone building they called the hospital, lying on the floor in a bed Read more
It has been a while between books, I know. So a reminder may be in order. The book you hold in your hands is the fifth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire. The fourth volume was A Feast for Crows. However, this volume does not follow that one in the traditional sense, so Read more
BELISARIUS ARJONA WAS perhaps the only con man who drew parallels between his confidence schemes and the quantum world. Ask a question about frequency, and the electron appeared to be a wave. Ask a question about momentum, and the electron appeared to be a particle. A gangster looking to muscle in on a real estate Read more
