confidence into narratives that hold together and make sense. She does not solve cases so much as tell the stories of them.

The whole village might be nothing but driftwood and wire, flotsam from the drowning of a far-off town.

He feels that he suffers from tinnitus of the soul.

“I appreciate that. But I know enough about Landsman here—fuck, I know enough about homicide detectives period—to know that sister or no sister, this is not about finding out the truth. It’s not about getting the story right. Because you and I, we know, gentlemen, that the story is whatever we decide it is, and however nice and neat we make it, in

Fata morgana, the phenomenon was called. A mirror made of weather and light and the imagination of men raised on stories of heaven.

“But we aren’t telling a story.” “No?”

A

His sharp and fleshless face is illegible as a blade or a skull.

Landsman watches, an interested party like all Jewish men from the moment that Abraham got Isaac to lie down on that mountaintop and bare his pulsing rib cage to the sky.