So I might as well get to work on my second novel, right? It’s either that or go crazy. Well, crazier, I guess I should say. And even though it’ll be really stressful for me to relive the pain and horror of the past few weeks-and to put all the loathsome and sorrowful details into a hundred-or-so thousand words-it’ll be better than just sitting here in my small, dark kitchen, listening to one awful radio soap opera after another, agonizing over what I’m going to have for supper tonight (Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup again?), or what bathrobe I’m going to wear tomorrow (a moronic concern since I only have one), or how the heck I’m going to drag my plastered (sic) and bandaged body up the incredibly narrow and precariously steep flight of steps to the bathroom.

Some choice. I can write about murder, or just wish it on myself.

Like I said, it isn’t easy being me.

Chapter 1

WHAT’S BLACK AND WHITE AND RED ALL over? A blood-soaked newspaper-like the Monday, December 20, 1954 edition of The Daily Mirror I was reading that fateful morning. The blood wasn’t real, of course-not in the sense that I could actually see it, or touch it, or accidentally smear it on the sleeve of my brand new pink angora sweater-but the paper was dripping with it just the same.

Twenty-six people had been killed in a plane crash at Idlewild airport. British troops had opened fire on student demonstrators on the island of Cyprus, slaying an undisclosed number and wounding many more. Chinese Nationalists had dropped forty bombs on two Communist islands off the shore of Formosa -number of casualties unknown.