June 3, 2014

Cocktail Talk: On the Edge

on-the-edgeYou know I love me some Peter Lovesey (British detective writer extraordinaire), especially his Peter Diamond series, but other stuff too. I figured, until recently, that I had or had seen the majority of his book. But then I was down at Powells in Portland (a bookstore of massive proportions) and they had a number of books by Mr. Lovesey that I’d never seen, including On the Edge, which I picked up and read and dug (well-plotted, nice post-war-London-ness, some scary ladies), especially for this quote, which highlights an old gin favorite:

He always whistled at the prices but it was the only pub in the district with carpets and soft lighting and barmaids who called you “sir,” and Antonia preferred it to anywhere else.

Today he offered her a Gin and It instead of the usual shandy.

She raised her eyebrows. “What’s this for, naught boy? No point in getting me sloshed if you’re going straight back to your boring students.”

“Is it no, then?”

“That’s a little word I never use.”

–Peter Lovesey, On the Edge

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