Killing the Lawyers by Reginald Hill (Harper Collins 1997)

"I know the Spartans, that's my old club, have been using the track evenings for training to help it settle. Plus there's the workmen putting finishing touches. Plus people using other bits of the Plezz could easily stroll in here. Shouldn't you concentrate on who's got access to the spare keys? Can't be too many of them."

Oh dear, thought Joe. Like a good princess, she wasn't going to be shy about telling the help what they ought to be working at.

He said, "Got your key handy?"

She passed it over. Joe moved along the wall of metal lockers. They came in blocks of eight. Zak's was second from the left. He counted two in the next block and inserted the key. The door opened. He did the same with the next block.

,p>This way the manufacturers only need eight variations on locks and keys instead of an infinity," he explained.

"But it's lousy security!" she protested angrily.

"Saves rate payers money," said Joe with civic sternness. "As for security, your crook's got to work it out first."

"You worked it out," she said not un admiringly

That's my job," he said modestly, not thinking it worthwhile to reveal that the lockers at Robco Engineering where he'd worked nearly twenty years had suffered from the same deficiency which he'd worked out after ten.

Gone Fishin' by Walter Mosley (Tandem Library 1997)

A lot of people might not like how I acted with that white woman. They might ask: Why didn’t he get mad? or Why would Mouse be breaking his butt to get money out of a poor farmer when this rich white lady would be so much of a better target?

Mouse was just doing what came natural to him. But there’s a reason I wasn’t angry then, why I’m still not angry and why the people of Pariah didn’t rise up and kill that woman: It’s what I call the ‘Sacred Cow Thinking.’

Miss Dixon lived alone out in a colored community that hated her because she owned everything, even the roads they walked on. But Miss Dixon, and every other white person, was, to that colored community, like the cow is to those Hindus over in India. They’d all starve to death, let their children starve, before they’d slaughter a sacred cow. Miss Dixon was our sacred cow. She had money and land and she could read and go to fine events at the governor’s house. But most of all she was white and being white was like another step to heaven...

Killing her would have been worse than killing our own children; killing her, or even thinking of it, would be like killing the only dream we had.

The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe (Penguin Books 1997)

. . . He leaned closer to Terry and confided: 'I'm down to four hours, you know.'

'Four hours?'

'Four hours a night. I've kept it up for the last week.'

'But that can't be good for you, surely. No wonder you look so tired.'

'I don't care. My target's three, and I'm going to get there. It's a struggle for some of us, you know. We don't all have your gifts. That's why I envy you so much. That's why I'm determined to discover your secret.'

Terry took a modest sip from his glass. 'Why despise it, anyway? I don't understand.'

'I'll tell you why: because the sleeper is helpless; powerless. Sleep puts even the strongest people at the mercy of the weakest and most feeble. Can you imagine what it must be like for a woman of Mrs Thatcher's fibre, her moral character, to be obliged to prostrate herself every day in that posture of abject submission? The brain disabled, the muscles inert and flaccid? It must be insupportable.'

'I hadn't thought of it like that before,' said Terry. 'Sleep as the great leveller.'

'Exactly. That's exactly what it is: the great leveller. Like fucking socialism.' The wine, Terry noticed, was starting to make Dr Dudden turn sour, and a burst of guttural laughter from Dr Madison's end of the table was enough to attract a poisonous look in her direction. 'Listen to that loud-mouthed witch,' he muttered. 'Huddled with her female cronies at the other end of the room. Have you not noticed, Terry, how this table tends to divide up on the basis of gender? That's her doing.'

Sacred by Dennis Lehane (Avon Books 1997)

Four years ago, after a particularly lucrative case involving insurance fraud and white-collar extortion, I went to Europe for two weeks. And what struck me most at the time was how many of the small villages I visited - in Ireland and Italy and Spain - resembled Boston's North End.

The North End was where each successive wave of immigrants had left the boat and dropped their bags. So the Jewish and then the Irish and finally the Italians had called this area home and given it the distinctly European character it retains today. The streets are cobblestone, narrow, and curve hard around and over and through each other in a neighborhood so small in physical area that in some cities it would barely constitute a block. But packed in here tight were legions of red and yellow brick rowhouses, former tenements co-opted and restored, and the odd cast-iron or granite warehouse, all fighting for space and getting really weird on top where extra stories were added after "up" became the only option. So clapboard and brick rise up from what were once mansard roofs, and laundry still stretches between opposite fire escapes and wrought-iron patios, and "yard" is an even more alien concept than "parking space."