Quotes from Pamela Burford

The brooch was a cheap bauble, but one with powerful sentimental value. Not that Irene was the sentimental type, aside from the smother-love she lavished on her toy poodle, but she'd known Colette her whole life. They'd grown up in the same grimy apartment house in Bay Ridge and had at one time

Oh yeah, that's what you want to be," she muttered as she slammed the drawer shut and fumbled for the one next to it, "the kind of woman men sleep with out of pity.

She'd located the junk drawer and it bore fruit: a short candle stub, the remnant, no doubt, of some intimate dîner tête à tête. A little more exploring turned up a mostly empty matchbook and a squat, wax-encrusted glass candlestick. She crammed the candle in the holder and touched a lit match to the blackened wick.

Had anyone thought to lay in a few candles here? she wondered, gingerly making her way through the gloom to the small kitchen, barking her shin on the marble coffee table in the process.

We're in business—romantic lighting," she dryly intoned. "Ha ha ha.

but my schadenfreude was dampened by the knowledge that if Detective Hernandez didn't have it in for me before, she sure as shootin' did now.