The Last Policeman (Last Policeman, #1)

by Ben H. Winters

He loved my mother a whole heck of a lot, was the explanation, and he just wanted to be where she was.

“You know what I’m doing right now?” I say, watching the muddy liquid rush toward the edge of the table. “I’m thinking: Oh no! The coffee’s going to spill onto the floor! I’m so worried! Let’s keep talking about it!” And then the coffee waterfalls over the side of the desk, splashing on Andreas’s shoes and pooling on the ground beneath the desk. “Oh, look at that,” I say. “It happened anyway.”

I’m suddenly thinking to myself, fiercely, painfully, that this is it. I will never fall in love again. This will be the last time.

I should have told Naomi the whole story, about my parents, the truth of it, but I didn’t, and now she’s dead and I never will.

we’ve got missing files, we’ve got suicides. We’ve got it all!” He sounds like my dad: Because it’s Concord!

I wish I could say, being a professional detective in the middle of an extraordinarily difficult arrest, that I maintain my composure and focus, but they are, they are, tears are rolling down my face like the flood.

Although, when you look at it from inside this cramped room with the cross on the door, full of boxes of guns and canned foods and pills and syringes, you start to think: well, afterward has started already.