Possessed of a singular writer's instinct, Lescroart drapes a bare-bones plot in psychological window dressing and produces a full-bodied, substantive, and stylistic effort of the first order. San Francisco ex-cop and current bartender Dismas "Diz" Hardy cannot believe his friend Eddie would commit suicide, so he decides to investigate. The progress of his search into Eddie's last days coincides with changes in his own emotional make-up, as he faces the reasons for his divorce and his feelings of guilt over the death of his infant son. Full attention to character, then, a sympathetic protagonist, and a satisfying conclusion.
Payback is murder. A beautiful woman paid it with her body. A seedy lawyer used somebody else’s money. It’s the vig—the exorbitant interest mob loan sharks take on their money. Now, in the City by the Bay, everyone has to pay…
The Wall (French: Le Mur) by Jean-Paul Sartre, a collection of short stories containing the eponymous story "The Wall", is considered one of the author's greatest existentialist works of fiction. Sartre dedicated the book to his lifelong companion Olga Kosakiewicz, a former student of Simone de Beauvoir.
Nausea (orig. French La Nausée) is an epistolary novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938 and written while he was teaching at the lycée of Le Havre. This is Sartre's first novel[1] and one of his best-known. The novel concerns a dejected historian in a town similar to Le Havre, who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea.
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
