A battering on the brass
knocker announced the belated arrival of Foxen Ellsworth-Howard, and the first
thing he said on entering was “It’s shracking freezing in here!”
Shrack was an extremely
nasty word, first coined to describe a particularly immoral act that had become
possible with twenty-second-century technology.
Ellsworth-Howard’s friends winced slightly, but only slightly.
(from The Life of
the World to Come by Kage Baker)
6½*/10.
The complete review is here.
.
“We have two scenes,” he
said. “We’ve got the splat around back
here on the side. And then the room the
guy was using. That’s the top floor,
room seventy-nine.”
It was the routine way of
police officers to dehumanize the daily horrors that came with the job. Jumpers were called splats.
(from The Drop by Michael Connelly)
8½*/10.
The complete review is here.
.
He seized it with both hands,
with extraordinary violence, and tried to tear it off his own body, and,
failing, punched it in an access of rage.
“Easy!” I said. “Be calm!
Take it easy! I wouldn’t punch
that leg like that.”
“And why not?” he asked,
irritably, belligerently.
“Because it’s your leg,” I answered. “Don’t you know your own leg?”
He gazed at me with a look
compounded of stupefaction, incredulity, terror and amusement, not unmixed with
a jocular sort of suspicion. “Ah Doc!”,
he said. “You’re fooling me! You’re in cahoots with that nurse – you
shouldn’t kid patients like this!”
(from The Man Who
Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks)
9*/10. The
complete review is here.
.
“You’re aware, I take it, that
we have prior permission to name the planet.
I want to hear suggestions.” (…)
“We can name it anything?”
she asked.
“Just about,” Thompson
responded, then, reflecting on the little trap that she had set for him, looked
at me and added, “Uh oh.”
“So, we could name the planet
‘Larry’ if we wanted?” Diana asked.
“As far as I am aware, there
are no other planets named Larry,” Thompson replied, willing to play along.
(from Orb by Gary Tarulli)
7*/10. The
complete review is here.
.
“Maybe you can’t read so
good. You see that tape there, says
crime scene and such?”
“The bright yellow and black
stuff?” I asked.
“That’s it exactly.”
“Yep.”
“Well, that’s what we police
use when we have a crime scene and we don’t want nosy private investigators
stomping all over it in their big boots and contaminating everything,” he
drawled.
“What if I promise to walk on
tippy toe?”
“Then I promise I will stop
bouncing you off walls just as soon as I think you’re not resisting arrest,” he
said in a cheerful tone.
(from Proven
Guilty by Jim Butcher)
8*/10. The
complete review is here.
.
The professor wore a white
dinner-jacket, his hair was white, he had white morning stubble on his chin,
and he carried a revolver in his hand which he pointed at Wormold. Wormold saw that the woman behind him was
very young and very pretty. She stooped
and turned off the gramophone.
“Forgive me for calling on you
at this hour,” Wormold said. He had no
idea how he should begin, and he was disquieted by the revolver. Professors ought not to carry revolvers.
(from Our Man in
Havana by Graham Greene)
6*/10. The
complete review is here.
.
