CHAPTER ONE Joe Gunther crested the hill overlooking a small cluster of flashing, multihued vehicles below. They made him think of a swarm of fireflies, settled untidily by the side of the road, but in fact were a group of cruisers and unmarked cars much like his own. They appeared randomly scattered, as if abruptly…
Chapter 1 I was born with a broken heart. The day I arrived into this lonely little world was also the first time I died. Nobody spotted the heart condition back then. Things weren’t as sophisticated in 1975 as they might be now, and my blue coloring was blamed on my traumatic birth. I was…
Chapter 1 After spending ten hours on my feet at the ice cream shop, I longed for a hot bath and a few hours curled up with an Agatha Christie paperback, a glass of pinot noir, and a cuddle with my cat, Rocky. But as the old New England saying goes, there’s no rest for…
Chapter 2 Donnie Donnie wakes to loud thuds on his cabin door. Each pound reverberates through his head like an explosion. He’s on the floor of the tiny room in the belly of the cruise ship. Twenty years ago, he and the band would have been in the coveted concierge suites. He pushes himself away…
Ronnie FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2001 That last Friday afternoon in November, the day Esther went missing, I was supposed to be doing my homework at the desk in my bedroom. We finished early on Fridays—at two thirty—and Mum liked me to get all my work done before the weekend. Everyone in the class had to…
PROLOGUE Every night, no matter how many drinks he’d had or joints he’d smoked, he would awaken to the screams of birds. For an instant, he would think he was back on the island. Then his hand would find the lamp beside the bed and the light would expose the messiness of his dorm room.…
PROLOGUE Today is day three hundred and sixty-four. Three hundred and sixty-four days since my last night of sleep. That’s almost nine thousand hours. Five hundred and twenty-four thousand minutes. Thirty-one million seconds. Or, if you want to go in the opposite direction, fifty-two weeks. Twelve months. One whole year without a single night of…
“In the early days of the Cold War, many Americans simply could not believe that a perfect gentleman like Alger Hiss could be a Red spy. David Adams Cleveland uses his gifts as a storyteller to imagine deeper human truths behind the headlines. Gods of Deception is a lushly vivid tale of a haunted time.”…
Chapter 2 As I gave my name at the entrance to Merton College it was still light, with that persistent and peaceful quality of summer days in England. While I waited for Seldom to come and get me, I peered into the grassy quadrangle of the first courtyard and became once more ensnared by…
Excerpt As hiding places went, you could do worse than the Village on a rainy Tuesday night. The bartenders at McSorley’s Old Ale House, on East 7th Street, liked to point to the dusty wooden chair tied to the ceiling and claim Abraham Lincoln had sat his bony ass in it a hundred years…
