“Lawd, I beg you, don’t drop a tin can ‘pon me head today!” So muttered Precious Higginson as she sat before her bedroom vanity and pinned her hair one breezy Friday morning in her Jamaican mountain home. Whether the morning was windless or breezy, Precious began every day with the same muttered prayer, for she […]
Chapter 1 The other problem I had was that I was falling in love with my best friend, Gretchen, who I thought the rest of the world considered fat. We were in her crappy car and singing, and at the end of the song “White Riot,” the one by the Clash, I realized by the […]
Chapter 1 Dan Hart died on his son Jonah’s sixth birthday. Jonah waited quietly all day long for his father who, filled with several lunchtime martinis and fumbling with the tape deck, had run off the road and cut his throat on his way through the windshield. Hidden from sight in the gully where he […]
(San Marino) They caught up with Russell Chen as he drove home from work, running his Lexus off the frontage road by the gravel pits of Irwindale. There were four of them, wearing reflective sunglasses and trucker caps pulled low, and for one terrified moment Chen though they meant to jack the car, kill him, […]
Limbo opens with a scene on a flight from California to Norway, followed by a car ride. How did you decide to start the novel with so much physical/geographical movement? Norway is a very “physical” place, and in terms of distance from the US, it is considered too far, beyond where most Americans who travel […]
Excerpt of Chapter 1 The fan stopped with the screech of a dying animal. The heat, pushed aside all this time, invaded the room again. He remained motionless, staring into the darkness. Another power failure, he told himself, feeling immediate guilt for not jumping out of bed to unplug the refrigerator. The coils might burn […]
Part One: Rewind April 13, 2001, NYC Except for the fact that it terminates life, death is such a little thing. Muscles cease to twitch, cells fail to regenerate, the body rots. Accidents are the perfect murder. Even the murderer doesn’t know he’s committing them. Until he finds the little gag ball of guilt somewhere […]
ONEDear Reader, The story thus far, as you may have forgotten: Even as a young boy, Billy Argo showed an uncanny talent for solving puzzles of almost every configuration, arrangement, and design. That is all. No—it was more than a talent. It was a kind of very sad genius, so that in the end, the […]