Joyce’s Reviews > The Green Grass Remembers: A DCI Blackwell Mystery > Status Update

(Wait, what? These paragraphs/pages appeared earlier too. Is it repetition to reiterate? Or was is an editorial goof?)

a rare species of moss, Grimmia anodon, that he had identified growing on the damp stone of the prison walls.

They call it a weed. But it is a pioneer species, a primary coloniser. It can live where nothing else can. It finds a way to make a world on a bare stone. A small, quiet lesson in resilience.

"A good result,"

"A just one," Ellie corrected him gently. "It’s not always the same thing.”

was killer, fact established by his own calm confession. But he was also last in line of guardians, scholar who had committed violent act to protect fragile, beautiful idea. law had no language for such distinction. It had only blunt instruments of guilt and innocence, of crime and punishment. intricate, tragic poetry of motive would be flattened into dry, legalistic prose of murder charge

He had been willing to compromise a murder investigation, to let a killer go free, all to protect his own fragile intellectual pride.

“My great-grandmother’s copy? I could never harm that. It’s sacred. But the library book... that was the public record. That was the version everyone could see. I wanted to wound it. To leave a mark of the desecration Tyne had planned, right there in the poem itself. A perfect, rectangular void where the truth should be. An injury for all to see.”

“When I found out what Tyne was going to do, it felt like he was killing that silent friend. He was taking a scalpel to my soul. So I took a scalpel to his.”

“Tyne was a desecrator,”

He spoke of the man as one would speak of a blight, a disease that had infected his sacred grove.

It wasn't neglected; rather, it felt curated by a different set of rules, where wildflowers were encouraged and symmetry was a foreign concept. It was a place of deep solitude, a fortress of leaf and branch.

The ghost on the page had led him to a man of flesh and blood.