Status Updates From A Time to Scatter Stones (M...

Fuck, I finished reading it in one hour.

Rating: 4 stars

The ending was kind of like a cool down, an epilogue, a closure in one sense, but felt like an odd inclusion and unnecessary. Definitely an HEA a male author would write, I guess. I didn't need to be exciting or anything, but, meh.

'Or sitting in the recliner with her feet up, reading the Bhagavad Gita. I don't see her clothes.' 'Can't you read the Gita with clothes on?' 'Yoga pants, maybe.'

Problem solved---masked avenger, Mahaffey-manner, 'throwing the perpetrator down the stairs,' so to speak.

"I'd have been more concise a few years earlier. An old man's like an old river, tending to meander, given to lingering in the interesting bends and curves it cuts into the earth. A couple of times I had to remind myself...that it didn't require a whole disquisition on the history of that venerable thoroughfare

"The bars were dives, but if a different order of magnitude from what nowadays get called *dive bars.* The term of choice back then was *bucket of blood,* and it fit...a ban made the rounds first thing in the morning, and anybody who still had a pulse would be hauled off to the drunk tank, because there was no such thing as detox then, not unless you were somebody rich drying out in Connecticut."

"You could go online and order a dozen different kinds of ninja shit, blowguns & throwing stars & nunchucks and other things I don't know the name of...In those states with a righteous commitment to the 2nd Amendment, you could get yourself a mortar and bazooka and, if you had the place to park it, a ---ing cannon. But if you were in NYC and couldn't show NYPD ID, they wouldn't let you get an overpriced wooden stick"

"I watched as pain and fear came into his eyes. Showing, not for the first time, that a bad liar is often a good man."

Scudder going back into the city to show residents out and about this sketch of the man makes for some observation moments I enjoy seeing mentioned. There's quips about how everyone can look familiar when you work with the public and about spellings, misspellings, and impossibility of the English language, how he goes into auto mode with figuring out genetic influence just by physical traits.

Interesting discussion between Scudder and his wife after the sketch artist friend did his thing, and his model's subtle, instinctive behavior toward him, in an "act of encouragement for greater emotional involvement in the work, as they came to the conclusion of. The feminine instinct of persuasion by subtle touch, nonverbal communication, the instinct to perform better at work for those one likes. The psychosocial