In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1)

by Tana French

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this—two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

I was on my way out of the car park and saw this little dripping girl in a red rain jacket, looking like Kenny out of South Park,

I suppose they figure that anyone who has the enterprise to dig down more than nine feet without getting spotted deserves a little leeway for sheer dedication.

identical sociopath-eyed politicians mouthing meaningless white noise,

I stick to foreign news, where distance gives enough simplification for the comforting illusion

Often the discrepancy works for us: people don’t know who to worry about, the little girl with the gun or the big guy apparently without, and the distraction of deciding keeps them off balance.

He was one of those people whom your mind instantly starts turning into a cartoon: scribbled wings and beak and ta-da, Road Runner.

you can blame any strange mood on coffee deprivation.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

…Now death is un-cool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.

(I still remembered, somewhere in my muscles, going over the wall: where the foothold was, the scrape of the concrete on my kneecap, the jar of landing).

Cassie eats like a teenage boy and hates missing meals,

do tend to forget to eat until I start getting irritable or spacy.

The sandwich was officially chicken and stuffing, but it tasted mainly of plastic wrapper,

She was losing her temper fast, and I saw this with a hard pleasure. My anger is cold, controlled, articulate; it can smash a short-fuse explosion like Cassie’s to pieces any day.

He always becomes more eloquent when he’s angry, another reason I think he’s brighter than he pretends to be.