The Dead American (Inspector Samuel Tay #3)

by Jake Needham

She was almost exactly the same height as Tay and had the kind of figure he used to hear called boyish, although it had been so long since he’d had a conversation about such things he wasn’t sure if anyone called it that anymore. She was wearing cream-colored slacks that had wide double pleats in front and a black silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up above her elbows. Her long blonde hair was twisted up into a bun on the back of her head and held in place by a pencil pushed all the way through it. Her eyes were green, like a cat, and they seemed impossibly large. Her skin looked like Limoges porcelain, so nearly transparent that Tay could trace the net of tiny blue veins woven into the skin of her neck. Those were all hopeless clichés, of course, comparing her eyes to a cat or her skin to porcelain, and Tay was embarrassed to catch himself thinking in clichés. But most clichés has become clichés in the first place because often times they were true. This was one of those times.