karen > Books: thanks-for-prezzies‎ (214)

Dear Reader - enclosed are all the documents you need to solve a case. It starts with the arrival of two mysterious newcomers to the small town of Lockwood, and ends with a tragic death.

Someone has already been convicted of this brutal murder and is currently in prison, but we suspect they are innocent. What's more, we believe far darker secrets have yet to be revealed.

We believe that the killer has given themselves away. It's there in writing, hidden in the emails, texts, and letters. In the events surrounding the charity appeal for little Poppy Reswick, and the question of whether that money was truly being used to fund her life-saving cancer treatment.

Will you accept the challenge? Can you uncover the truth?

It was then when I let my imagination run wild. I'm telling you, all I could think about was the idea that this guy could very well be the kind of guy who keeps women in a man-made well in his basement and says things like, "It rubs the lotion on its skin before it gets the hose again." Seriously? Seriously.

The possibility that Psycho Crazy Dude could actually be psycho and crazy began to dawn on me. Now, I knew I had been lucky enough to survive a standstill operation. But what if I didn't have any luck left? What if I ended up in the well? What if I ended up having to rub lotion on my skin? What if it was me, Joe the Bartender, about to get the hose again?

...the right to bark at any time...the right to lay down and snooze or have a wee at any time, night or day, in any car park, parking space, local park, or petrol station, and the right to gather in groups of up to 1,000 in any churchyard, train station, theatre, cafe, cricket pitch, bowls lawn, football pitch, church, mosque, or restaurant.

This book, like its title character, saw a fiery birth. Formerly a swirl of disembodied phrases and feelings and half-characters, the story of Ella and Kev began to coalesce while, in Paris, I learned of the non-indictments of the police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. After the revelation of the circumstances surrounding the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, I began to hear, with greater force, the stirrings of Ella's voice and Kev's. Each new horrifically regular death, whether upon initial police contact or later during police or carceral custody, made clearer what I wanted to say. Because while I mourned, I thought of the families left behind and how the orbit of hurt at the center of which sits each of these tragedies is spread almost beyond imagining. In a fiction genre that traffics in the impossible, I wondered how such people, such families, might find themselves situated.

What might the opposite of injustice look like?