World of Trouble (The Last Policeman Book, #3)

by Ben H. Winters

if the DSM-IV were still being updated and applied, this new illness would be added in red. A debilitating obsession with the gigantic asteroid on a collision course with our fragile planet. Astromania, perhaps. Delusional interstellar psychosis.

want to get into the hole because that’s where my sister is, my sister or individuals possessing information as to her whereabouts; Cortez wants to get into the hole because it is there.

to do what he loves with what time is left. I am a question mark pointed at a secret, Cortez is a tool aimed at the stubborn places of the world.

Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man’s planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn’t do.

It’s not just a person’s present that dies when they die, when they are murdered or drowned or a giant rock falls on their head. It’s the past, too, all the memories that belonged only to them, the things they thought and never said. And all those possible futures, all the ways that life might have turned out. Past and future and present all burn up together like a bundle of sticks.

can feel it, a feeling I never had occasion to notice until it disappeared, the odorless colorless presence of the future.

I am a question mark aimed at an answer.

But everybody does everything for a reason. That’s lesson number one of police work; it’s lesson number one of life.

Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we’re waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there’s no glittering ore hidden under the dirt.

The truth is, at a certain point it was like a game. How preposterous can we make the whole thing? How unlikely a scenario, how self-evidently unbelievable, and see if these people would still believe it. Turns out: pretty much all the way. People will believe pretty much any goddamn thing if they want to bad enough.”

Solving a murder is not about serving the victim, because the victim is, after all, dead. Solving a murder serves society by restoring the moral order that has been upset by the gunshot or knife strike or poisoning, and it serves to preserve that moral order by warning others that certain acts cannot be committed with impunity.

she’s got it wrong, I don’t want vengeance. Vengeance is the cheapest of motivations, it’s a tin star on a shabby coat. I want answers is all that I want.