In the Canyons of Shadow and Light by Emily Donoho
Alex Boswell is a veteran NYPD homicide detective, introspective, world-weary and cynical. He’s been on the job too long, but it’s the center of his life, and the last thing he wants to do is quit. But strange things are happening that make him question his sanity. They play out against a tangle of cases: the death of an autistic boy in a care home, a deadly armed robbery in Harlem, and an assistant district attorney found dead in his Upper West Side apartment. Alex feels like he’s losing his grip on reality in a police department culture prizing toughness, where a breakdown could end his career. Can he do his job while hiding his deteriorating mental condition from his colleagues and from himself, or will it overtake him in the end?
This is a sweeping story about death investigation, memory, mental illness, and accepting vulnerability, even when you’re a hardboiled New York police detective.
Author Bio:
Emily is a native of Boulder, Colorado, currently living in Glasgow, working as a freelance writer. She did a degree in psychology from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, before she moved to the UK for more degrees, completing an MA in the history of science at Durham University and then a PhD in historical geography from the University of Glasgow. Her PhD examined the history of madness and of psychiatric provision in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. After a couple years spent discovering that postdocs in history were as rare as wolves in Scotland and working as a freelance horse trainer, she went back to uni for an MSc in journalism at Strathclyde University.
When not writing, she can be found riding her horse, paddling a kayak on lochs and rivers, or somewhere on a mountain.
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I’m lucky enough to have an extract to share with you today from the book!
Trying to be inconspicuous, Alex had signed out the white 1998 Suzuki Esteem the squad kept around for surveillance, instead of a Crown Vic or Taurus. Nothing screamed ‘cop’ in Washington Heights like a white guy in a Ford Sedan. Some years ago, James Hurley had christened the Suzuki “Mollie,” after an ex-girlfriend, whose one redeeming characteristic, James explained, was that she had a big ass. The name stuck. The car looked like a heap: dents in the bumper, the upholstery inside marred with holes and coffee stains, the sun visors attached with duct tape, about five lights illuminated on the dash, and a can of WD-40 in the door pockets because the door latches jammed. The interior reeked, a combination of BO, fried food, and cigarette smoke. No amount of car shampoo nor air freshener would get rid of it.
Even driving Mollie and dressed in faded jeans and a tatty, threadbare fleece, Alex didn’t blend into the neighborhood as well as his black and Latino colleagues, but he did his best to maintain a low profile. He parked about four addresses down the street from Analisa’s apartment, far enough away for her to not notice the car, but close enough for him to see whether or not she left the building, or anyone entered it. Then it was a matter of waiting and boredom. Most tails were. He nursed a large Styrofoam cup of coffee and ate a chocolate croissant for breakfast, hearing Ray rebuking him. “You know you’d feel a lot better if you didn’t eat such shit all the time.” Yeah, he probably would. But Ray wasn’t here. His only company was the police radio, which he’d tuned to the Three-Three’s channel, but he kept it on a low volume. To pass the time and look busy to any passerby who glanced in the car, he fumbled through the New York Times crossword while keeping one eye on the front door of Analisa’s apartment.
Washington Heights bustled around him: men in suits and women in heels with professionally arranged dreadlocks hustled to work; mothers stood on the stoops with a baby on their hips and a toddler in tow; teenage gangsters in clothes three sizes too big slouched off to school or maybe not; the homeless and the dope fiends, their eyes haunted and faces hollow, wafted hungrily through the crowds. They melted together like snowflakes in a blizzard, minding their own business in the way only New Yorkers knew how in the swirling, fast-paced melee of street life.
Alex’s mind roamed as he surveilled the apartment and the people circulating past his car, his thoughts inhabiting a Washington Heights that was recurrent, changing, self-referential, his old maps overlaying current ones. Paths through open-air drug markets on the corners, through dog-leg alleyways and boarded up, derelict apartments; nights sweating in a hot car or a police van on a stakeout at 155th Street or 167th Street or Malcolm X, playing rummy with James and Bill Ryan or Marty Vasquez or Sam Rizzo or Matt Cohen, keeping hold of a jittery CI, who will tell you when your suspect walks in or out of the bar you’re watching, while trumpets and saxes duel in a nearby club and drug touts shout out the names of their products, a soundtrack to the eternal night of waiting.
Or charging into a smoky apartment or townhouse, your gun drawn, on the heels of Emergency Services. You wonder if the dealers inside the crackhouse are better armed than you. You hope not, and you rush past the surreal disjunctions – the Santeria shrines, the paintings of saints, the candles, the offerings to God, to superstition, worshipped by desperate, semi-conscious addicts, and by the dealers placing little value on life, and you disparagingly say to yourself that if there is a God, he can’t possibly give a shit.
Or a call to a DOA in a narrow building with rusty fire escape stairs clinging to it like a peripatetic centipede, hidden in the shadows on an alleyway that you hadn’t noticed until then, and neither has anyone else, because the DOA has been there for some time, and the smell sends you staggering.
You think you know your way around, but you get lost in a city constantly evolving through your synapses, over bridges, through subway tunnels, along one-way streets, and you are not the person you were years ago, and the streets are no longer the same streets, although you keep re-treading old pathways worn into your memory.
His heart pounded so violently he found it difficult to breathe. The very organ that kept him alive, hurting him. The pale lights blasted through his vision. In a final attempt to stop it, he reached for his throat with his hand, but something choked him, his windpipe and esophagus closing, his tongue swollen and dry, tasting bitter and alkaline when he touched it to the roof of his mouth. He went blind and had no idea where he was.
He was a passenger in a car, somewhere on the Upper West Side. An ear-shattering screech ripped the night asunder. Another grinding shriek answered it; metal slamming into metal at forty miles per hour. Alex flew into the dash, and the seat belt jammed into his shoulder and gut, saving him from smashing his face. Then the spinning car threw him against the door with a thudding blow to his ribs, knocking the wind out of him, yet no pain.
As unexpectedly as the violence started, it stopped. The only sound he heard was the rain beating against the roof of the car.
Drunk and dazed, he touched his face and he felt something warm and gooey. He smelled coppery blood and tasted it in the back of his throat. He looked at his hand, shocked; it was covered in blood. It felt dead, like it wasn’t his hand. Frightened, he touched his face again. Blood gushed out of his nostrils, soaking into his shirt and tie. He’d scraped up his face. Wherever he pressed, his hand picked up new red smudges. Mopping up blood with his sleeve, he staggered out of the car into the pouring rain and limped around its front end.
The bumper had detached from the car, the headlights mashed to jagged pieces, the grill mangled and twisted, the hood misshapen, half-revealing the car’s innards in a gaping wound. He felt his way along the Toyota’s crumpled flank to the driver’s side and peered through the shattered windshield. Zoë’s head flopped to the side, and blood was pooling in the seat around her. More blood than anyone can afford to lose. She was dead. DOA. Oh, God. Alex had seen so many dead bodies that even shell-shocked and wounded, he knew it then and there.
For some time, he stood frozen to the spot, mindboggled. Zoë was dead. Why wasn’t he dead? The car was totaled, the whole left side squashed, the windshield smashed, glass everywhere, crunching under his feet. The Ford Explorer that hit them had wrapped itself around a lamppost on the curb. And the Toyota had spun three hundred-sixty degrees after the Explorer had t-boned it.
