Eight Perfect Murders (Malcolm Kershaw, #1)

by Peter Swanson

I have never been good at making friends. Sometimes I blame it on the fact that I am an only child, and that neither of my parents, excepting my father when he was drunk, was particularly sociable. But I think it goes deeper than that, to an inability to make genuine connections with people. The longer I interact with someone, the more distant I begin to feel from them. I can feel an enormous amount of affection for an elderly German tourist who visits my store for ten minutes and buys a used copy of a Simon Brett novel, but whenever I begin to truly get to know people, it’s as though they start to dim, as though they are behind a glass partition that gets thicker and thicker. The more I learn about them, the harder they are to see and hear in any meaningful way. There are exceptions. Claire, for one. My best friend in junior high, Lawrence Thibaud, who moved to somewhere in Brazil at the end of eighth grade. And characters in books, of course. And poets. The more I learn about them, the more I like them.