Set in 1923 in the American southwest, a young judge has an enormous responsibility to make in a capital case where a man is charged with murdering his beautiful wife. The parallel plot is his inability to handle life, love, success. Great story.
Nothing of the cathedral: it was too squat, too sunny: only the gold of stained glass and a touch of West Indian baroque on the porch, black archangels, “my piccaninny putti”. Within, a high altar, from which Father Scarron gazed out, at Christmas and Easter, over three hundred worshippers, some ...
The camp had been a village, and I wondered where the villagers were. We had been shipped north by truck, some of the trucks open and the men freezing again, hunched and huddled again, too cold for tears. Again we had arrived by night, so that I never knew through what gate, beneath what sign of ...
He was a bad shot with the pistol, but this derived from faulty coordination of hand and eye, not from tremors or sudden surges of hot blood. Nevertheless, he chewed his lower lip now and when he was not cursing he invoked the aid and protection of the supernatural. He was tailing the black sedan...
Mornings were never congenial, and this one was less encouraging than most. His head would not clear. When Helen had left the bathroom and joined the children downstairs, Joe walked in to meet his image and found it pale and puffy. He looked round-shouldered; there were wrinkles in his neck; even...
For two miles the river was barely visible from the road, cut off by a string of warehouses and sheds. The road swarmed: trucks, donkeys, dockers, on the landward side shops and markets; thousands of men, women and children toting, shouting, buying, selling. A white man, mustachioed, in a pith he...
He got up and hefted the stick. Cheng’s name was cut into the handle. When Wen-li came in with the coffee Girard said, “Where did you find the stick?” “I borrowed it,” Wen-li said. “Do you plan to play today? I will come to watch.” “Do not joke,” Wen-li said. “It will do you good. You need physic...