Extracts

I was seven years old when I saw my first dead body.

First there was nothing. Then there was everything.

Whenever I woke up, night or day, I’d shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed.

It was so hot in the car that the seats smelled as though they were melting.

The places we are born come back.

Let me tell you something about trees.

Chain Night happens once a week on Thursdays.

Jack Reacher caught the last of the summer sun in a small town on the coast of Maine, and then, like the birds in the sky above him, he began his long migration south.

I knew I needed a killer opening line.

The three cardboard boxes were stored at the bottom of the wardrobe.

I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to feel.

After I spotted a python climbing into her picnic basket and yelled out, I got chatting to a young woman down at Black Lake.

That night, he was Ed.

Friday night was going perfectly to plan for Chloe.

The space between was the worst.

Gus Riskin sipped from a bottle of water as he surveyed Trey’s living room.

‘My name is Charlotte Reynolds.’ I lean forward as I speak into the tape recorder, though I’m not sure why.

The Call came on a sunny afternoon in spring.

If Vera arrives before Harry her whole life will change.

Someone is watching me. I can feel it—the eerie sensation of being followed, an invisible gaze locked on my back.

My mom has three freckles, light brown and almost perfectly square, two on her right cheek and one on her nose.

I was sixteen when Sean Kenyon came into my life; he was twenty-two.

All of this began in October 1978.

The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought, enough, we were thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling forward but giving the illusion of stillness and tranquility.