Jim Thomsen

“He was looking like he felt quite sorry for himself, but happily so, and found a waiter to order more drinks from. He asked for a gin and tonic with those same elaborate instructions he had tried giving in Marianne’s earlier. It had to do with lemon wedges.”
― Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast

“The connective tissue between large Texas cities is brown nothingness. Buildings sprout from the flat ground in the distance when you get close enough to a city, their tallest structures reaching up to the sky like the blocky dark fingers of some buried giant from an alien race, but before you get there, the only thing around you is dirt, a few weathered shrubs, and an endless blue sky that sometimes makes you think it’s close enough to shatter if you throw a big rock at it. It’s like whichever deity was in charge of the terrain just gave up and copied and pasted the same mile over and over again all the way along I-10.”
― Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You Home

“She tried to imagine marriage, as she had as a girl at St. Clerans, her family’s estate in Ireland, covering her eyes with a veil and dream-walking the grounds as a fairy-girl bride, but she quickly came to: There was always present the vortex of a darker past, what had been done to her and Jack as children, what they had done to each other as adults, and would probably, even against their will, do to each other again. In Barcelona they met again. They talked of Regina Le Clery, his friend who had just died in a plane crash at Orly Airport, and again of her mother, killed in a car crash in 1969, who managed her father’s many transgressions ably, like a deposed queen burying a broken heart; and they talked of ghosts, memories that lace the eye; and he fell asleep fingering the pearls, once her mother’s, she wore that night to bed; and following him to France, she discovered he had slept with another woman.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“Divorcing her wouldn’t work. He couldn’t handle the girls on his own, and it would be bad for his image, especially right before a big campaign. He’d just have to put up with her and pray she got cancer, which aside from getting rid of her would be great for optics.”
― Stanton McCaffery, Neighborhood of Dead Ends