More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Life is too short to drink bad wine. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
the most remarkable unremarkable man who ever lived.
‘Police work,’ said Stefan, ‘is ninety per cent paperwork, nine per cent bullshit and one per cent horror.’
I ended up learning magic because you can’t trust the British to keep to an agreement over the long term.
far better to be safe than radioactive.
Mama used to be a radical Green, which is how she met my father. She assaulted him, he arrested her – it was love at first handcuffing.
It was horrible coffee, but wet policemen can’t be choosers.
There was a statue on the lawn outside of a woman, hand on breast, looking mournfully upwards as if contemplating the death of a loved one and the amount of paperwork it was bound to cause.
‘Yes,’ Uncle Stefan always added. ‘Just like digging a ditch – the trick is to make sure you’re the one standing to one side with the clipboard.’
Vanessa made a strange inarticulate sound common to Germans who’ve figured out how to start a sentence but don’t know how it ends.
As police you can live with the violence, the squalor and the stupidity – it’s the waste of people’s futures that really grinds you down.
if she’s talking she’s probably being sarcastic.
life’s too short to drink bad wine. Regret is a terrible vintage.’
Peter Grant would have put down a marker, I thought. He probably would have used a laser rangefinder to measure the rate of growth in millimetres per hour.
They say that in police work, as in science, a negative result is as good as a positive.
‘You know how it is,’ he said. ‘You go home from work, eat something, play some video games or watch television and the next thing you know it’s time to go to bed.’
