that it’s defined by absence? The magic is gone.

few additional days for discreet inquiries about my client, and the clients of my client—a standard, and often enlightening, precaution. Then,

Whatever secrets he discovers in that vein, McAnnis thinks, don’t need to go into the report to his client.

Duncan Mayer could have waited for her to pass out, then carried her unconscious body to his truck and driven in the dark to the boathouse on the lake, where a pile of stones lay waiting, filled the pockets of her housecoat, pushed her

Reader is now dressed and styled contemporaneously to the Characters, not the Audience.

The lean-to by the dam, home to lost virginities. The cliff trail named for the old woman who hiked it every day until she fell to her death. The teenage daughter who disappeared for nine months, and when she returned, the family announced they’d adopted a distant relative’s baby. The late-night poker games after which ashen-faced men would toss

Devotees of Agatha Christie—is there a plot device she didn’t try?—will recognize that she utilized a variant of this tactic in her final published Hercule Poirot novel, Curtain.

Room 302, Susan Burr smiling at him in the shadows;

The dialogues that follow include references to Gerald Ford, peanut farming, the PLO, the Concorde, and the rising cost of fireworks during this Bicentennial year—those raw ingredients of verisimilitude that construct an ersatz world within which characters will act out pantomimes of death for the purposes of entertainment.