Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder’s Reviews > A Long Line of Dead Men > Status Update

“Tomorrow you’re going to be in the room with the killer. Do you think you’ll be able to sense anything?”
“I doubt it.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You were a cop a long time. You’ve got the instincts. That might keep him away.”
“My instincts?”
“Knowing that you’re going to be there. Unless, you know, he wants to be face-to-face with his adversary. What do you think?”
“I think you’ve been watching too much TV.”

"... a task force consisting of cops from five different precincts in the Bronx and upper Manhattan, and they set out a string of decoys and came up with Eldoniah Mims. A Norwegian kid, obviously.”
"Well, they’ve always been a race of troublemakers.”
“I know, them and the fucking Estonians."

This book includes a shoutout to my brother Estonians 🇪🇪 🤣!

“And the whole club isn’t some kind of a tom-tom?”
“Huh?”
“Wrong word,” she said. “A tom-tom’s a drum. Dammit, what’s the word I want?”
“Where are you going?”
“To look it up in the dictionary.”
“How can you look it up,” I wondered, “if you don’t know what it is?”
She didn’t answer.
“Ha!” she said, a few minutes later, and I looked up. “Tontine,” she said. “That’s the word. It’s an eponym.”