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( The guards came midmorning, this time Jordan and Kudravetz. They took Jason to the subbasement, and there was no question of X’s intent. Stripped down to fighting shorts, he stood barefoot on swept stone, the glint in his eyes cold, critical, and eager. When the guards left, X leveled those eyes at Jason. “I assume we still understand each other?” “You made your point perfectly clear. Nothing has changed.” “Do you require time to prepare?” But Jason was already in the cold place, the killing place. He raised his hands, and watched X circle, looking for the feint, the feint within the feint. Hands. Feet. The flick of an eye. Sometimes the feints were words designed to distract or disarm. It was a favorite strategy. Unsettle the mind; destroy the balance. Destroy the balance; obliterate the man. )

( The guests chattered. Everything was bright with summer sunshine. She took in every detail, as if looking for something out of place, something that could spoil this perfect day. She looked at the children playing tag in the car park. She looked at a kite shaped like a comma, dipping down over the flat ground, then soaring up again. She looked at lovers, holding hands as they walked by the tiny art gallery by the lighthouse. And then she saw the woman, a long way off, striding with a sense of purpose. As the guests chatted, she approached. She was walking towards them at speed. “Excuse me,” Alex said to Curly. She untangled herself from the packed picnic table and stood. The woman was in her fifties or sixties, dressed in a plain grey mac, gloves still on, as if defying the summer. )

( We don’t know her, man,” Bearded Man said. He and his companion turned their backs on him. Ike took a deep breath so violently his nose burned. Ike felt like he was rooted to the floor. His skin was tingling all over like he had stepped on a live wire. The real estate between him and the two men seemed to fill with dangerously charged energy. They had turned their backs on him. Inside that was a sign of disrespect so egregious it might get you sent to the farm just on general principles. Ike’s right hand was a fist before he realized he had curled his fingers. He stared down at it, and through a sheer force of will he made himself unfurl his fist. He had to be smart. He didn’t need the cops throwing him in a deep dark hole. At least not until he finished this. “Thanks.” Ike choked the word out and walked away. )

( Everywhere I see signs of the police search – evidence markers, broken twigs, boot prints – but I’m not looking for the same things they were. A psychologist views a crime scene differently from a detective. Police search for physical clues and witnesses. I look at the overall picture and the salience of certain landmarks and features. Where are the obstacles and boundaries that alter behaviour? How quickly does someone disappear from sight? How far can I see in each direction? What are the vantage points and the shortcuts? )

23rd October - it won the category which shows what little I know!

( I need to be ready, she thinks. I can’t be like Eilidh and just drift along thinking everybody’s going to be nice. Uri’s right, we do need Guards – but we need to be able to fight back ourselves, as well. Against invaders, but also against the Jaivyns within our walls. I need a weapon. In a couple of years, I apprentice with the Blacksmiths. A knife. That’s what I want. A knife so when Jaivyn Blake comes for me I can stab his grasping hands. Everyone gets to make something useful. There’s no rule that says it can’t be a knife. And I can make the handle when I learn to be a Carpenter, before I make my graduation box. It’ll be all made by the time I’m ten. )

( There were lush evergreen bushes studded with berries of all types, overgrown tangled creepers, and a few flowers struggling to survive beneath the onslaught. I recognized a few—hellebores and snowberries springing up from between dark-leaved laurels, and what I thought might be a laburnum up ahead. As we turned a corner, we passed underneath an ancient-looking yew so old it formed a tunnel over the path, its strange, tubular berries crunching underfoot. Its leaves had poisoned the ground, and nothing grew underneath its spread. There were more greenhouses in here, I saw, though they were smaller, still with enough glass in their broken frames to have built up an impressive amount of condensation. The inside of the glass was blotched with green lichen and mold, so thickly that I could barely see the remains of the plants inside, though some struggled up through the broken panes of the roof. Four brick paths quartered the garden, meeting in a small circle in the centre, where the statue stood. It was so covered in ivy and other creepers that it was hard to make out, but as I drew nearer, brushing aside some of the foliage, I saw that it was a woman, thin and emaciated and broken down, her clothes ragged, her face skull-like, her blank stone eyes fixing mine with an accusing stare. Her cheeks were scored with what looked like scratches, and when I peered closer I saw that the nails on her skeletal hands were long and pointed. )

( Birch’s footsteps echoed through the corridor, her heels making a clop-clop sound like horses’ hooves. She was on the first floor, in the Hairdressing department: on either side she glimpsed rows of white sinks and fat black chairs through the training-room doors. All silent now. The light in the corridor was dimming, and no electric lights had yet been switched on. She glanced at her watch: almost six. She’d been here nine hours. Detective Chief Inspector McLeod was downstairs in the refectory, and he’d drawn all available personnel to him, like moths to a bare bulb. Birch had slipped away from the back row of the briefing after a while: he wasn’t saying anything she didn’t know, and she’d have to suffer through a private audience with him later, anyway. She needed a few minutes’ peace. And it was peaceful up here, though the strong smell of industrial disinfectant hung in the air. Birch stopped walking. Beside her, running along the wall up to about waist height, there was a patch of painted plaster that was lighter than the rest. It was about a metre and a half long. Metal fixings and chewed plastic rawl plugs jutted out of the patch at intervals. There was a rectangle of tape on the floor here, and a number marker-penned onto the waxed surface inside it. This was where the radiator had been. This was where Leanne Lawrie, the ninth victim, had fallen, and been found. )
Addendum 25th July : Congratulations to Claire Askew on making the shortlist in both categories that she has been nominated for.

( To you maybe north and south ain’t nothing but a line on a map. But to me and the people I grew up with it’s like a different country. You can go up to Camden Town with your girl or what have you for a day out but you better not be going up there with your boys unless you are fully prepared to get into something. You don’t even have to be ganged up to cause a beef. You could just be a normal guy out with your mates and people will assume you are in a gang. It’s just an age thing. I heard loads of stories of young guys being knifed up just for straying into the wrong ends. Even when they were on their own. People look out for you. And if they don’t know you and you’re on their patch, they will come after you. For no reason other than you walking on their ground, you get me. )

( It’s not often you see a man with a diamond in his beard. But when a prince runs out of space on his ears, fingers and clothes, I suppose the whiskers on his chin are as good a place as any. )

( Murder Most Timey Wimey )( Read more... )

( Devlin followed Dumont on to Lower Regent Street. Halfway up the street, Dumont suddenly turned and scanned the crowds as if checking for anyone following. Devlin was safely concealed in the shadow of a shop awning. After a moment, Dumont resumed his walk then 20 yards from Piccadilly Circus, jumped into a taxi that raced off around the boarded-up Eros and into Shaftesbury Avenue. )

( Considering all of the effort we put into gathering firewood, you might think that life in the cabin during the winter was cozy. It was not. Surrounded by ice and snow five feet deep or more was like living in a freezer. From November to April, our cabin was never truly warm. Sometimes the outside temperature during the day never climbed above zero. Frequently the overnight low hit thirty and forty below. At those temperatures, you can’t draw a breath without gasping when your capillaries constrict as the cold air hits your lungs, while the hairs inside your nose crinkle when the moisture in your nasal passages freezes. If you’ve never lived in the far north, I promise you have no idea how incredibly difficult it is to counteract that kind of deep and all-pervasive cold. Imagine the cold as a malignant fog, pushing down and in on you from all sides, rising up from the frozen ground, working its way through every minute crack and chink in the floor and the walls of your cabin; Kabibona’kan, Winter Maker, coming to devour you, stealing the warmth from your bones until your blood turns to ice and your heart freezes and all you have to fight against him is the fire in your woodstove. )

A New Year, and a new opportunity to revive my efforts to review the CWA Dagger nominees. This time I’m going to be sampling titles submitted by publishers for the awards, ahead of the longlist announcements in May. My new job with its hour or so of commuting has given me more reading time (and the more sociable shift patterns have also helped.) There will be (I hope) occasional diversions back to previous winners and other acquisitions from Alton’s excellent second-hand bookshop.

( ‘Terrible news, isn’t it? They’ve fenced off half the bank, Mick White says, though you can’t see it from here. Police teams, sniffer dogs, them white tent things … though what good they think that’ll do now, I don’t know. Whatever’s buried there, it’s been out there in the wind and rain long enough, from what Judy Wallace’s old man said. Her it was that found it, and to hear Mick’s account, their dog snapped it right in half at the elbow, brittle as a stick. Between that and the salt, I don’t suppose there’s much left of it now.’ )

( Aector's House )

( East dreamed interstate dreams, dreams he’d never had before, choppy, worrying. Running the wrong way, or driving against oncoming traffic, or impossible land : a highway emptying into a river, a bridge wobbling, a prairie breaking up. Or ahead of them in the east, L.A., with its smog and brown mountain scrim, where it shouldn’t be. All the land – people talked about America, someday you should see it, you should drive across it all. They didn’t say how it got into your head. )

( You could feasibly throw a tennis ball and cover the distance between Slough House and St Giles Cripplegate, but if you wanted your ball back, it might take a while. For there was no straight route through the Barbican, which resembled an Escher drawing assembled in brick by a spook architect, its primary purpose being not so much to keep you from getting where you were going, but to leave you unsure about where you’d been. Every path led to a junction resembling the one you’d just left, offering routes to nowhere you wanted to go. And set down in the middle of all this, like a paddle steamer in an airport, was the fourteenth century church of St Giles, within whose walls John Milton prayed and Shakespeare daydreamed; which had survived fire, war and restoration, and which now reposed serenely on a brick-tiled square, offering quiet for those needing respite from the city’s buzz, and a resting place for poor sods who’d got lost, and given up hope of rescue. )

( Headlights swing around a bend, accelerating towards him. Audie plunges down a ravine, turning his face to the ground so it won’t reflect the light. The truck hurtles past, kicking up a cloud of dust that balloons and settles around him until he can feel it on his teeth. Getting to his hands and knees, Audie crawls through the tangle of brambles, dragging the plastic gallon containers behind him. At any moment he expects to hear someone shouting and the telltale click of a bullet sliding into a chamber. )

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gervase_fen

January 2025

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Page Summary

Disordered Daggers : The Unwilling by John Hart (2021)
Disordered Daggers : The Trawlerman by William Shaw (2021)
Disordered Daggers : Razorblade Tears by S A Cosby (2021)
Disordered Daggers : Good Girl, Bad Girl by Michael Robotham (2019)
Disordered Daggers : The Poison Garden by Alex Marwood (2019)
Disordered Daggers : The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware (2019)
Disordered Daggers : All the Hidden Truths by Claire Askew (2018)
Disordered Daggers : You Don't Know Me by Imran Mahmood (2017)
Disordered Daggers : A Necessary Evil by Abir Mukherjee (2017)
Disordered Daggers : The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (2018)
Disordered Daggers : Merlin at War by Mark Ellis (2017)
Disordered Daggers : The Marsh King's Daughter by Karen Dionne (2017)
Disordered Daggers : The Lying Game by Ruth Ware (2017)
Disordered Daggers : Dead Pretty by David Mark (2016)
Disordered Daggers : Dodgers by Bill Beverly (2016)
Disordered Daggers : Real Tigers by Mick Herron (2016)
Disordered Daggers : Life or Death by Michael Robotham (2014)

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