The Eyre Affair
Chapter One
A Woman Named Thursday Next
"... The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual
or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the
more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going onto Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24).
Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the
ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. It is rumored that SO-1 was the department that polices
the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone's guess. What is known is that the individual
operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and slightly unbalanced. "If you want to be a
SpecOp," the saying goes, "act kinda weird ..."
MILLION DE FLOSS
-A Short History of the Special Operations Network
My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don't mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the
ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle. Dad had
been a colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn't know he
had gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house ... read full excerpt from Eyre Affair, The: Thursday Next Series #1 ebook
