Extracts

The transformation occurred at approximately 2:23 A.M.

Downtown Drugstore had a bell on the door that made a single tink sound when you opened it.

I stare down at the lifeless body.

‘She’ll hate it,’ Dennis probably said to Moose when she told him Leslie was going to Las Vegas.

A few days after I turned twenty, I took my cousin Peter on a midnight climb.

‘How long will you be staying?’ asked the man behind the black marble counter.

After the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered New York City, where we lived most of the year, we decided to quarantine on Martha’s Vineyard with our two youngest children, then fifteen and twelve.

‘So, do you come here often?’

Jimny Adams should have died that day.

The slums of Aravell were eerily quiet at the midnight hour.

A jolt of jagged pain shoots through Luna’s ankle.

I am not late. I am absolutely not late. I can feel the heat rising in my cheeks and my heart beating at an unnaturally fast pace and I want to tell the fifty people who are turning to look at me that I was fifteen minutes early for the bus.

The sun collided with the horizon the moment we reached the causeway.

‘It was murder. I’m absolutely sure of it.’

Tina Barnes turned the key to the BMW X3.

‘No.’ It’s a word I’ve heard more times in my life than I ever could’ve anticipated.

It was the blood on the doorknob that caught his eye.

I fantasize about cutting him out of my will, making sure he doesn’t get a penny.

The children of Orlfen used to swap stories about what might happen if the Prince of Rostenburg ever returned.

Western Australia Friday, 10th January 1958

Have you ever noticed how bad things happen sometimes, and there seems to be no explanation?

Sarah kneels on the captain’s chair to reach Playground’s steering wheel, hands gripping at ten and two o’clock, exactly like Mum and Dad taught her.