The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.

I have a secret passion for mercy. . . but justice is what keeps happening to people.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him,, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married.