Roger S. Pressman

“Kate stashed her camera gear in the foyer corner, and rested her back against the locked door, her bad leg throbbing. The smell of last night’s lasagna still lingered in small pools of spicy scent around her. She scanned her home. Too bad she’d fallen for this apartment. High ceilings with ornate moldings. Something out of her dreams. She should have known better. She pushed off. Enough memories. First she dug for an envelope from the box she kept stashed in a kitchen drawer. A final”
― Terri Tiffany, The Bend

“crushed wing. Crying, in a pitch almost too high for Patricia to hear. She looked into the sparrow’s eye, enveloped by a dark stripe, and she saw its fear. Not just fear, but also misery—as if this bird knew it would die”
― Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky

“We stared at the vegetation for a moment, and I wondered whether the loss of a wife or child had burned the haggard and bluish look of cholera death into his memory. A few years before I was born, the water from a public pump on Broad Street had killed more than six hundred people, marking the end of London’s last cholera epidemic. A cesspit had been dug too close to the public pump, allowing the disease to spread quickly. As soon as both pump and cesspit were shut down, the epidemic ceased.”
― Annelie Wendeberg, The Devil's Grin

“Since coming to Kidlington, she’d managed to get on to Hillary’s boat, but the search had been disappointing and inconclusive. If her immediate boss knew where her late and unlamented husband had kept his money, it didn’t show. And she certainly hadn’t spent any of it —it was one of the first things Gemma had checked. Her car was ancient, and her home was still a bloody narrowboat of all things.”
― Faith Martin, Murder in the Mansion