Hocus

Excerpt

Chapter One

I told them I was going to try to get some sleep, but I don't think I fooled anyone. None of us would sleep that night. I hadn't even tried. I was still wide awake, sitting in a chair across the room from the too wide bed, staring at it as if it were a stranger in my house; thinking too much; repeatedly, relentlessly recalling that the last thing my husband and I had done together was to part in anger. I do not know of any potion as bitter as the realization that one may have lost all opportunity to ask forgiveness.

Hours earlier I had been more complacent about making apologies. Frank didn't show up for dinner, but I figured work had held him up. After all, a homicide detective's schedule is not one you can set your watch by. As a reporter, my own hours are fairly irregular. This was not the first night one of us had eaten across from an empty place setting.

I didn't have much of an appetite. I sat there, wondering how a week that had begun so gloriously had so quickly gone to hell. On Monday Frank had been instrumental in breaking a major case: his work had led to the identification of two members of Hocus, a group that had been on a destructive rampa ... read full excerpt from Hocus ebook