A Death in the Small Hours Quotes

“Dallington might be disappointed. Still, he would have dozens of chances to marry, if he wished, while Freddie must have given up on the idea, what, ten or twenty years before. It was providence that had brought Miss Taylor to his home.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“Yet he wanted desperately to change the laws of his country, and if this was the way to do it, so it should go, he thought.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“this sentence he summed up Plumbley’s attitude toward Cat Scales, as had been Cat Musgrave. All of that was”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“Only that for all their seeming hysteria, the people of Plumbley are proved quite correct in the end. Musgrave was an evil presence,”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“But then why not? Dickens’s greatest gifts had been humor and a conscience, two virtues that belonged in a political speech.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“Indeed, what had been the point of all this? It was hard to imagine a life more comfortable than Oates’s; he lacked a wife but he had friends and family, a decent job of good work. Men like Wells, men of ambition, Lenox could understand their turning to crime. But Oates?”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“This was a relief, actually. It wasn’t Sophia, wasn’t Jane, wasn’t Edmund in trouble, but as his senses returned he did see with three o’clock clarity (sometimes mistaken, sometimes revelatory) that it all felt wrong, about Wells. There was an error somewhere in the chain of logic.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“Of course, in Sussex they think that everything means you’re about to die—an owl in the daytime, the smell of roses when there aren’t roses nearby, the wrong fold in clean linen.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“You have the luxury of coming here when you like. He must manage a great estate all on his own, year-round. I can understand why he might want to leave that responsibility to his nephew.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“Have you noticed, Mr. Lenox, the intense moral pressure that a village feels it has the right to bring to bear upon any of its members? That”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“Of course he knew that in all likelihood one day longer in Plumbley would not have altered his understanding of the case, or prevented the violent assault upon Weston, and yet he resented Dallington for fetching him back to London at such a crucial moment.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“Society was growing gentler, more inclusive, perhaps, even, he hoped, less stratified. This was the change he had stood for Parliament in the hopes of achieving.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“There’s no need to find melodrama in the situation, Charles. Wendell would take any number of your daughters in if you asked him to.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“Indeed Everley was famous in Somerset, famous even in England, among the people who knew of such things, for its serene loveliness. It had none of the grandeur of a palace, or of the great medieval castles—it was only two stories—yet it had a beauty all its own.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“On the contrary, through the years many people I’ve known have left London to write the opening speech. People will consider you statesmanlike, I imagine, if you disappear to have a deep think through things. It implies an appropriate seriousness. Really, honestly.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“There again, he knew Jane was happy, too, for his change of career, though she didn’t mention it. It meant an end to the knives and beatings and guns”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“confessing that I rather do. I’d be curious to clap eyes on this Florence Waugh. For one thing, how did she grow so rich? Is there a dead husband in her history?”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“Lenox had been deeply suspicious at first, but within a matter of months the young man—neither as pure at heart as Lenox would have wished, nor the wastrel his reputation would have had one believe—had saved his mentor’s life and helped to solve the detective’s thorniest case in years.”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours

“There is no sense in resisting time, or change. Both will come to all men, whether they accede gracefully or kicking. I’m old, now, and let that be an end of it. There, eat some peas, you need”
― Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours