Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.

If you enjoyed laughing in the face of death, you might like to have a crack at High Saffron. One hundred merits, and all you have to do is take a look.' 'I understand there's a one hundred percent fatality rate?' 'True. But up until the moment of death there was a one hundred percent survival rate. Really, I shouldn't let anything as meaningless as statistics put you off.

I have a very varied taste in music. Everything from rap to classical to Latino to Rat Pack to jazz.

Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth.

To a great extent, I still write for myself, write what amuses me. Fortunately, I have a quirky sort of strange sense of humor that appeals to other people and that's good. I still sort of write for myself though there are some areas of the book I feel I have to put in and I feel I have to deliver.

You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.

Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable.