“‘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–

“Sherry Ann Frazier knew she’d seen him somewhere before.

The gaunt, sharply cut edge of his jaw. The narrow, dimly lit eyes, staring back at her. The probing intensity of his crooked smile.

Maybe on a trip somewhere, or at an airport. You know how you pass by someone you might never see again and yet their face is permanently implanted in your mind. Or maybe she’d seen him at her shop. people were always coming in… She’d seen him before – that mush she knew. Definitely.

She just couldn’t remember where.”

–excerpt from the prologue–

“Louis lowers himself toward you, and I am fastened to the look on your face. i see your lips begin to arrange themselves and I know, I know. I see the word form, the syllables hardening and sliding from your mouth with no effort. Your voice, not unsure or hoarse from lack of use but clear and bold. One word, the first in three years.”

–extract from the prologue–

“Such nerve he had. The life she’d lost, the life he’d stolen. The rumours, the truth worse than the rumours. The thunderous fights, the decades of tightlipped endurance. The day she left: He stepped out, she packed up. A one-way ticket, her one suitcase. Everything she left behind – he could rot in it. The tongue-tied character she became in Engish, the apron-clad grandma she became for the girls. The peaceful life she finally made for herself in old age, in California.” –quote from A Thread of Sky–