Tokoro’s Reviews > A Time to Scatter Stones > Status Update

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.

Scudder met with an old acquaintance Elaine had met and discovered and got work, commissions, a gallery residency for of an old police sketch artist for identifying suspects. So some interesting background about the relationship with the thrift shop sales and sketch work in general, the likelihood of many around the city doing it casually in public just for themselves.

On Fauve Matisse: " 'There are some paintings of his that are not all that different from what you see in thrift shops. He knew what he was doing, and the thrift-shop artists didn't, except maybe intuitively. And he knew how to get the effects he wanted, and they didn't, and who's to say that they got what they were aiming for? But if you look through enough bins...' 'You might find something to hang on the walls.' "

I like the description of this TJ kid from the streets who helped them out as a scouter from past Scudder volumes, but all grown up, auditing as many classes as he could, Columbia, NYU, never metriculating or formal edu. Something I wish I could've done, still wish I could do. I love public lectures---public libraries, local museums... I miss it all. I'm guessing this aged TJ guy will come to help Scudder again.

They are calling books under 200 pages novellas now? My Ed McBain and Mickey Spillane novels around that length weren't considered such, right? Focus so far is on dialogue and banter, but there is something of a set-up of Scudder going back into work after retirement this one time---a Girlfriend Experience client who won't take no for an answer; he thinks he's special. It does have a novella sort of tone to it...