Saturday, September 27, 2025

Opening paragraphs..................

 

The worst smell in the world is dead badger.  He'd encountered it on his morning walk down a green lane; had caught the odour without seeing the corpse, but had guessed what it was before returning later with a shovel.  Whether they all smelled that bad or whether this one had expired of noxious causes he didn't know.  As it turned out, he couldn't do anything about it either—the creature had crawled into a tangled nest of roots to die, and it would require heavy machinery and a strong stomach to recover it.  Lacking the former, and not wanting to put the later to the test, Max opted for a third way; he'd walk a different route for a while, and see if one of the local farmers shifted it in the meantime.  Which was why he wasn't sure the badger would still be there a couple of nights later, when he was running for his life.

-Mick Herron, The Secret Hours


No comments:

Post a Comment