Lines in Books

To be loved is craved, sought out and prized, then fiercely protected. This basic human instinct is at the root of the problem, where foolishness begins. A woman is drawn into a relationship with an abusive man who gets into human trafficking and ultimately tries to kill her. Thankfully, her family supports her although some friends drift away... She tells her tale many years after the relationship itself with the benefit of hindsight. 

Grief is a house with no windows or doors and no way of telling the time. Two sisters born ten months apart become so enmeshed in each other that it's hard to know where one begins and the other ends, where fantasy ends and reality begins especially when the world is inexplicable in so many ways... The younger is bullied at school and, in attempting to protect her, the older is electrocuted in an accident. The sister who lives on does not seem able to wrap her head around the death imagining her dead sister continuing to live until she  actually does return from the dead in a way. The sisters had made a pact in life, the older one who was as protective as she was domineering demanding that the younger promise that if only one of them were to survive, it would be get her, and in death, she came to inhabit her younger sister's body, virtually obliterating her. 

'The finale must be the heroine and her faithful friends, singing as they walked to their deaths. Their voices would gradually diminish as each one ascended the scaffold. Each time there would be the whoosh of the blade coming down. Finally, the heroine would be left alone and her lone voice would ring out until the blade silenced it for ever.' (Phineas Fox Mystery #3) A nun is sentenced to death in revolutionary France for being the keeper of proscribed music once sung when people were walled in to die, so too her fellow nuns though they for refusing to accept all that the new regime demanded of them. They had travelled to France from England and, centuries later, their secrets were uncovered when it emerged that the bizarre ritual and its chilling accompaniment had not completely died out. 

...thunderstorms might well rampage across the skies, and there might be revolutions and riots in the streets, but folk still had to eat. (Phineas Fox Mystery #5) Decades after WWII, a scrapbook with references to Chopin's Library and music played at the execution of traitors -- both of which are so obscure that there are doubts about their ever having existed -- is found in rubble at Warsaw. The clues it holds leads to old secrets being uncovered, sometimes unknown to to those who were actually involved in events as they took place...   Weaving history into the imagined, this mystery tells of how two half-sisters who did not know of each other's existence were ultimately united by means of the scrapbook long after their mother had died believing that her first daughter had been killed in a fire which she herself had set along with the friend who later fathered her second daughter. The two of them had set the fire to wipe out evidence of having killed the woman's father at

Christine has that layer under her skin that cuts off her outside from her inside and allows no communication between the person she once believed she could be and the person she has in fact become. The does not acknowledge the other's existence. The women from war are like that, a new kind of being that no one knew one before, not exactly male but no longer female. How easy it is to become unlikable and to act atrociously when one feels as though, perhaps not without reason, that the cards are stacked against one and that, regardless of what one does to improve one's lot, one is destined to fail... Add to that trauma which causes woman to disengage from herself, to become harsher than she would likely have been without the trauma of being a woman in a man's world, of belonging to a post-colonial country recovering from war.

And there are always those who would watch Alexandria burn. There always have been. There always will be. We are all stardust & stories, we're told. And sometimes there is no fixing things other than to move forward in the brokenness. But there can be revival. And so there is in a magical underground library. 

But when it comes to my houses - well, I always feel a pride, and I like to know people will live in those houses and weave their own histories. History isn't always what's written in books or taught in schools. The history of ordinary men and women is embedded in walls and floors and timbers of buildings. A builder commits four murders: the wife who poisons her husband, her sister when she spurns him, her nephew who he believes has seen him kill his mother, and his father who knows his secrets. The dead speak on: through music they play in death, through their letters they wrote in life, ultimately leading to the sordid tale which unfolded a century ago being uncovered.