Laurie R. King - Night Work

Raves for Laurie R. King

One of the most original talents to emerge in the '90s.

Kirkus Reviews

King's prose is immensely readable and her characters [are] complex and interesting. King is a damned fine prose-smith too good a writer not to read.

Mystery News

King is a talent to be reckoned with.

Feminist Bookstore News

King always writes well, and her stories sweep along with an inexorable force that comes from a power greater than mere skillful plotting.

The Boston Globe

And Kate Martinelli

Laurie King knows how to keep a plot boiling, and her crusty, sharp-tongued Kate is appealingly vulnerable.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Laurie R. King manages to create from Page 1 of every book the feeling that the reader will be in good hands. Martinelli is the kind of person you'd like to know and talk with over many lunches; a smart and tough woman.

Chicago Tribune

NIGHT WORK

Kate's passion, and King's, brings new urgency to a familiar story about merging personal conviction with professional duty.

Kirkus Reviews

A solid choice for those who like tough female cops.

Booklist

WITH CHILD

Smart, thoughtful Ms. King has a way with children warm characterizations searching insights This detective has a mind that is always on the move.

The New York Times Book Review

TO PLAY THE FOOL

Beautifully written, with clearly defined and engaging characters.

The Boston Globe

A GRAVE TALENT

Winner of the Edgar and Creasey Awards for Best First Crime Novel

If there is a new P. D. James lurking in this stack of books, I would put my money on Laurie R. King, whose A Grave Talent kept me reading deep into the night.

The Boston Globe

An amazing first novel with intelligence, intrigue, and intricacy This work exhibits strong psychological undertones, compelling urgency, and dramatic action.

Library Journal

And Laurie R. King's stand-alone novel
A DARKER PLACE

A nail-biter thriller.

The New York Times Book Review

Laurie R. King delivers a story that casts a spell of psychological terror more visceral than any serial killer melodrama and that, for the thoughtful reader, offers intellectual rewards as well.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Mystery Novels by Laurie R. King

Mary Russell Novels

THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE
A MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN
A LETTER OF MARY
THE MOOR
O JERUSALEM

Kate Martinelli Novels

A GRAVE TALENT
TO PLAY THE FOOL
WITH CHILD
NIGHT WORK
A DARKER PLACE

And coming soon in hardcover:
FOLLY

To Linda Allen,
friend and agent,
who believed

With thanks to Gretchen Tom, who deciphers the King hieroglyphs better than their creator does, and to Bob Pori, for sharing his pharmacological expertise.

And with deep gratitude to the members of the San Francisco Police Department, especially Captain Kevin Dillon, Inspector Holly Pera of the Homicide Detail, and Inspector Pamela Hofsass, who took pity on a poor novelist and tried their best to inject a little reality into the following story. They are not to be held responsible for the stubborn insistence of a weaver of fiction, who values the textures of storytelling over the actualities of on-call schedules and promotion priorities.

But I got the gun right.

The kingdom of Kali is within us deep.
The built-in destroyer, the savage goddess,
Wakes in the dark and takes away our sleep.
She moves through the blood to poison gentleness.

The image on the wall was enough to give a man nightmares. It showed a woman of sorts, but a woman who would have made a playboy shrivel, given pause to the most ardent feminist, and had Freud scrambling to retract his plaintive query concerning what women wanted.

What this lady wanted was blood.

Her skin was dark, so deep a blue it seemed black against the crisp, bright, bloodred waves that splashed against her muscular calves. Around her hips she wore a belt strung with human hands that had been hacked off at the wrist; her neck was looped with a necklace of skulls. Her wild black hair made a matted tangle from which serpents peeped, and from her right ear hung a cluster of dry bones. Four arms emerged from her strong shoulders, in the manner of Hindu deities and the half-joking fantasy of busy mothers the world around, and all twenty of her dagger-long fingernails were red, the same bloodred as the sea around her. In her lower right hand she held a cast-iron skillet, wielding it like a weapon; her upper left grasped the freshly severed head of a man.

The expression on the lady's face was at once beautiful and terrible, the Mona Lisa's evil sister. Her stance and the set of her shoulders shouted out her triumph and exultation as she showed her tongue and bared her sharp white teeth in pleasure, glorying at the clear blue sky above her, at the pensive vulture in a nearby tree, at the curling smoke from the pyres of the cremation grounds on the hill nearby, at the drained, bearded, staring object swinging from the end of her arm.

She looked drunk on the pleasure of killing, burning with ecstasy at the deep hot lake of shed blood she was wading through.

And she looked far from finished with the slaughter.

She was Kali, whose name means black, the Indian goddess of destruction and creation. Kali, who kills in joy and in rage, Kali the undefeatable, Kali the mother who turns on her faithless children, Kali the destroyer, Kali the creator, whose slaughter brings life, whose energies stimulate Shiva to perform his final dance, a dance that will bring about the end of all creation, all time, all life.

It is a place of skulls, a deathly place
Where we confront our violence and feel,
Before that broken and self-ravaged face,
The murderers we are, brought here to kneel.

Kate Martinelli sat in her uncomfortable metal folding chair and watched the world come to an end.

It ended quite nicely, in fact, considering the resources at hand and the skill of the participants, with an eye-searing flash and a startling crack, a swirl of colors, then abrupt darkness.

And giggles.

The lights went up again, parents and friends rose to applaud wildly, and twenty-three brightly costumed and painted children gathered on the stage to receive their praise.

The reason for Kate's presence stood third from the end, a mop-headed child with skin the color of milky coffee, a smile that lacked a pair of front teeth, and black eyes that glittered with excitement and pride.

Kate leaned over to speak into the ear of the woman at her side. Your goddaughter makes a fine monkey.