On the nights they went to bed at the same time, Rocco would lie there and watch her go to the closet, watch her choose either silky slips or mannish shirts, like running up sex...

But then something happened, Ray, something amazing. Something…”That white cop sitting next to me? He took a long look at my mother when she came in, just like, absorbed her, and then without even turning...

Some day, my son, you are going to learn that the two greatest joys of being a man are beating the hell out of someone and getting the hell beaten out of you, good night.

The County Jail looked like a tall, forbidding elementary school. Seven stories of dirty brown brick, one hundred years old and now operating at 330 percent of capacity.

His voice was languidly dense, as if he was a little slow on the uptake, but Strike knew that tone came from the man’s feeling of complete control.

Strike said “Huh” again, thinking about betrayal, about how everything and everybody were just so much smoke.

I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend’s a Puerto Rican,...

You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.

Rocco was gripped with the panic he often experienced around her, around himself. He seemed to be both here now and simultaneously five years in the future looking back at this moment, at the loss...