“The grey morning veil still lingers over Miami Beach as the city starts to wake and the noise of opening cafes breaks the calm of dawn. Traffic is light at the famous art deco stretch known as Ocean Drive, which is just beginning to be mottled with people walking their dogs, buying the newspaper or exercising. No beachgoers or tourists yet, at least not this early in the day.”

–extract from prologue–

“The curtain opened and a tall, thin man, with dark hair and a scar over his eye, stepped out. He had a gun, and it was pointed straight at her head.
In her last remaining second, Edna spotted just inside the room beyond the curtain, an elderly Chinese man, seated at a desk, his forehead resting on it, a rivulet of blood training from his temple.
The last thing Edna heard was a woman – not Pam, because Pam was done talking – saying, “We have to get out of here.”
–extract from the prologue–

“‘Izzy’, my friend Maggie said, ‘I need you to try this murder case with me. Now.’
‘What?’ I shifted my cell phone to my other ear, not sure I’d heard her right. I had never tried a criminal case before – not even a parking ticket, much less a murder trial.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Right now.’
It was a hot August Thursday in Chicago, and I had just left the civil courthouse. I had taken three steps into the Daley Center Plaza, looked up at the massive Picasso sculture – an odd copper thing that looked half bird, half dog – and I actually said to it, ‘I’m back’.”
–opening paragraphs–

“He killed his partner. He might as well have taken the gun and pulled the trigger himself. Only fourty-eight hours had passed during which he’d doubted anything would help him forget. How ironic it was that the woman in his bed had done what a bottle of scotch could not. She’s been a blessing, something he didn’t deserve.”
–opening paragraph–

“The swerve (to use Judith’s own term) that slipped her outside the customary course of her life derived from one of those off-hand moments in which odd circumstances and amplified emotions invite an odd and over-coloured response. Amusement was the presumed objective, whatever the actual result might be… At the time though it seemed simple. Judith was renting a storage garage for some old furniture and when, late in the transaction, she was asked her name, she gave one that was not her own, a name in fact she hadn’t thought of in years. A few hours later, Judith, who was not a loser of keys, lost a key.” –extract from opening chapter–