Tony

“what do you know, you wait your whole career to write a locked room mystery, and two come along in the same book.”
― M.W. Craven, The Botanist

“She explained the science in the way only Bradshaw could: she made something complicated sound even more complicated.”
― M.W. Craven, The Final Vow

“Even better was the Gray Case. Gray had been missing for over a year, and his wife was ready to give him up for dead. Blue searched through all the normal channels and came up empty. Then, one day, as he was about to file his final report, he stumbled on Gray in a bar, not two blocks from where the wife was sitting, convinced he would never return. Gray’s name was now Green, but Blue knew it was Gray in spite of this, for he had been carrying around a photograph of the man for the past three months and knew his face by heart. It turned out to be amnesia. Blue took Gray back to his wife, and although he didn’t remember her and continued to call himself Green, he found her to his liking and some days later proposed marriage. So Mrs Gray became Mrs Green, married to the same man a second time, and while Gray never remembered the past – and stubbornly refused to admit that he had forgotten anything – that did not seem to stop him from living comfortably in the present.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“The actual story of Damoclēs and his monarch Dionysius is of no relevance here, except, that is, for the punch line, which left Damoclēs sitting at dinner beneath a naked sword suspended from the ceiling by a single thread. The moral of the legend being that a person’s situation in life is always chancy. Another moral might have been that if you find yourself at dinner with a sword hanging over your head, move seats.”
― Ben Elton, Stark: Satirical Thriller