Magpie Murders (Susan Ryeland #1)

by Anthony Horowitz

But I’m not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we enjoy it.

There would be no funeral. He had seen too much of death in his lifetime to want to adorn it with ritual, to dignify it as if it was anything more than what it was . . . a passage.

I think people can be quite cruel—or thoughtless, anyway. Often it’s the same thing.

The house is seventies modern with sliding windows, gas-effect fires and a giant TV in the living room. There are almost no books. I’m not making any judgement. It’s just the sort of thing I can’t help but notice.

I had devoted my whole life to books; to bookshops; to booksellers; to bookish people like Charles and Alan. And in doing so, I had ended up like a book: on the shelf.

I hurried forward and entered the church. The interior was huge, cluttered, draughty, a collage of different centuries. It was probably unhappy to have arrived at this one: the twelfth century had provided the arches, the sixteenth the lovely wooden ceiling, the eighteenth the altar—and what had the twenty-first bestowed upon St Michael’s? Atheism and indifference.

Names have a way of stamping themselves on our consciousness. Peter Pan, Luke Skywalker, Jack Reacher, Fagin, Shylock, Moriarty .

It’s often occurred to me that divorce suits some women. I’d have said that about her.

Life may imitate art—but it usually falls short of it.