Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs
He was so in love with Mary Jo it made me feel like songs should start spontaneously playing anytime they were together.
The Last King of California by Jordan Harper
Murder is a type of magic. It has powers so a single person killed with intention can haunt the world more than a million lives ended by car crashes or cancer.
Again he has that feeling like he’s standing with his toes poking over the edge of this flat earth. He thinks on something he read in a novel in Intro to World Lit, before he quit going to class altogether. About how when you peek over the side of a cliff and get that swooshing feeling in your belly, that it isn’t a fear of falling. In fact, the book said, it is the opposite. Vertigo is the fight in your mind between the part that wants to save you and the part that wants to fall.
[She] takes shallow breaths to deal with the smell. [His]’s place doesn’t smell like death. Death doesn’t smell like anything. It’s the hungry slime of life that stinks.
Life grabs you in its jaws like a bear and all the flailing around and the screaming you do while it eats you, that’s what we call free will. Like the bear’s not there, like all this wailing and fury and fucking up everything is just what we choose to do.
Then maybe once or twice in a life you see someone flip loose from the bear’s mouth altogether and walk free through the world, and it scares the hell out of you.
Storm Front by Jim Butcher
“Paranoid? Probably. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t an invisible demon about to eat your face.”
Never let it be said that Harry Dresden is afraid of a dried, dead bug. Creepy or not, I wasn’t going to let it ruin my concentration.
So I scooped it up with the corner of the phone book and popped it into the middle drawer of my desk. Out of sight, out of mind.
So I have a problem with creepy, dead, poisonous things. So sue me.
The Camelot Shadow by Sean Gibson
He raised his eyes to the window to watch as snowflakes fell from the sky with a nonchalance that seemed defiantly at odds with their short lifespans.
“I understand you are a highly regarded scholar.”
“I suppose you might say that I know quite a lot about very little of consequence.”
Fridays are very agreeable days, perhaps owing to their position in the week. Whatever the reason, I find them very accommodating, days that one can depend upon to provide succor no matter what ignominious events Tuesdays and those dastardly Thursdays have wrought.
He was a trim man of average height whose lips curled in a perpetual smirk, one that indicated both his willingness to be amused by life and his expectation that life do something to reward that willingness.
“If wits are to be our primary weapon, I fear that we may be bringing a metaphorical bayonet to a gunfight.”
“I would have said an olive fork.”
“I’m not very good at not knowing what I can’t do.”
Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman
Days of death are days when we weigh our relationship with love in our bare hands. Days when we remember what has gone, and fear what is to come. The joy love brings, and the price we pay. When we give thanks but also pray for mercy.
Swiped by L.M. Chilton
But just as I was about to close the app, an emoji popped up on the screen.
Of course, it was the fucking winky face, my least favorite of all the emojis, the text equivalent of yelling, “Not!” after a sentence.
I always thought that Sarah had an overly-romanticized view of marriage. Her parents had the sort of relationship you only see in Richard Curtis movies–dedicated, loving, and solid as a rock. She’d grown up in a gorgeous and massive cottage in Haywoods-Heath, surrounded by idyllic countryside, and while she didn’t technically own a pony–I was pretty sure that she hung out with one on a regular basis.It was classic British rom-com territory, so no wonder she always dreamed of a bumbling English fop to sweep her off her feet.
I was so angry at the world I just wanted to shut everything away. His manic pixie dream girl had curled into a pangolin of grief, and I couldn’t blame him for slowly backing off.
(“pangolin of grief” might be the best phrase I read this month)
A Study In Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas
“Well, I for one, thought your hypothesis was remarkably elegant. It really is too bad that sometimes inconvenient facts surface to thumb their noses at remarkably elegant hypotheses.”
“Poo to inconvenient facts.”
This Is Who We Are Now by James Bailey
I’m struck by how much thinner his hair is than last summer, when it was thinner than the time before. It disappears in half lives, always tending toward complete baldness but never quite getting there.
Danny drives the way he does everything else. Overconfidently.
Midnight Riot/Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch
Being a seasoned Londoner, Martin gave the body The London-Once-Over, a quick glance to determine whether this was a drunk, a crazy, or a human being in distgress. The fact that it was entirely possible for someone to be all three simultaneously is why Good Samaritan in London is considered an Extreme Sport, like base jumping or crocodile wrestling.
If you ask any police officer what the worst part of the job is, they will always say breaking bad news to relatives, but this is not the truth. The worst part is staying in the room after you’ve broken the news, so that you’re forced to be there when someone’s life disintegrates around them. Some people say it doesn’t bother them—such people are not to be trusted.
(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)
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