• Blood and Magnolias
    The Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks along Cypress Lane did not sway so much as it hung, like laundry left to dry on a line that had not been pulled in thirty years. Bell Thorne stood on the porch of the house that had been her family's for four generations and watched the rain fall in sheets that turned the dirt road into a river, and she thought about how water, left long enough, could...
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  • The Observer at Five Points
    ACT I: THE BOY FROM BROOKLYN I first met James Whitfield in the summer of 1963, when we were both twelve years old and living in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan. He was tall for his age, with dark hair and eyes that seemed to take in everything at once. I was smaller, scrappier, the kind of kid who got into fights he couldn't win and then wrote about them in a notebook he kept under...
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  • The Last Dispatch from the Raj
    ## Act I: The Outset The heat of the Punjab in 1857 was a physical entity, a shimmering wall of gold and dust that blurred the line between the earth and the sky. Arthur, a second son of a minor English earl, stood on the veranda of the district bungalow, his white linen suit already stained with the sweat of a dying empire. He was twenty-one, a graduate of Oxford with a head full of Shelley...
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  • The House on Blackwater Bayou
    The house sat on the edge of Blackwater Bayou like a woman who had inherited a fortune she did not want and could not refuse. It was large -- not mansion-large, but plantation-large, the kind of size that implied generations of people living under the same roof, eating at the same table, sharing the same secrets. The cypress trees surrounded it the way guards surround a king who has stopped...
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  • The Night Shift at Oakridge
    The coffee at Oakridge tastes like it was brewed in a radiator. I have been drinking it for eleven years, three months, and fourteen days, which is longer than I was married and longer than I worked at the plant before they shipped everything to Mexico. I don't complain about the coffee. I don't complain about much anymore. You learn what you can change and what you can't, and at my age, the...
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  • Blood and Magnolias
    I. The magnolias were blooming, which meant summer had arrived in a way that made the air so thick you could chew it. I stood on the porch of the main house and watched the flowers—white, perfect, obscene in their beauty—swaying in a breeze that smelled like damp earth and decay. I was twenty-eight years old, and I was the last Thorne who lived in the house that my great-great-grandfather had...
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  • The Echoes of the Bight
    (Nigerian Igbo Variation) The village of Umuofia was a place of red earth and ancient whispers, where the spirits of the ancestors resided in the rustle of the iroko trees. Okonkwo was a man of iron and silence, a warrior whose reputation was built on the strength of his arm and the rigidity of his adherence to the clan's laws. He believed that the only way to survive in a world of chaos was to...
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  • THE SILENT PARTNER
    The radio crackled with news I had orchestrated but never intended to hear broadcast. "Federal investigators arrive in Blackwater, probing mass death event..." I sat in the corner booth of Finch's Saloon, watching the dust settle on my whiskey glass. The neon sign above the bar flickered—OPEN, then OFF, then OPEN again—like the moral certainty of men who had never had to make difficult...
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  • The Last Honor of Alistair
    The castle of Blackwood stood on a cliff overlooking the grey Atlantic, its stones worn smooth by centuries of salt and wind. It was a place of echoing halls and faded tapestries, a monument to a nobility that had long since lost its purpose. Count Alistair, the last of the line, spent his days in the library, reading the journals of ancestors who had once led armies and shaped kingdoms....
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  • The Pattern in the Mind
    The first case was elegant. That was the first thing I noticed, and perhaps the first mistake I made. Crime scenes are rarely elegant. They are messy and desperate and human in the way that a scream is human or a broken bottle is human. But the scene on East Eighty-seventh Street was composed. The body was positioned with intention. The blood was arranged in patterns that my trained eye...
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