“a helplessly devoted student of human frailty”

“the boiling human chaos of metropolitan New York”

“He was accustomed to paying measurable heed only to those details that bore upon him most directly.”

“The man dabbed briefly at his lip with his bloody sleeve end and then cocked back his head and laughed. The sound was sharp and joyless and desperate.”

“The husk of a man in the woods below me bled into a creek that fed into a river that sparkled gaily in the winter sun.”

“The southbound motorists crawled past, eyeing the conflagration and the quartet of cops who had arrived to eye it as well.”

“We could easily have been abject strangers with no history of brief unsatisfying cinematic sex between us.”