Hard Case Crime: The Max Read Online Free PDF Page A

he hadn’t been the most useful person in her predicament, seeing the randy chap, um, having his way with her. Gosh, it had been almost exciting. And to say she’d overreacted, I mean really . Didn’t she know those Med types were hot blooded? It wasn’t like the gell (pronounced thus) hadn’t been down the M1 before. And then, oh lordy, the cleaver. She was like some bloody Irish guttersnipe.
    He’d been in some scrapes, a chap doesn’t get to his late twenties, alright, mid-thirties, without the odd ruction, but this, this was like, what was that awfulHollywood tripe? Texas Chainsaw Massacre? This was like living a gosh-awful B-movie he and the chaps might rent after a night on the tiles in Cambridge.
    Oh, he swore, by all that Cambridge held sacred, if he got free of this mad cow, he was legging it back to Blighty and scoring some dosh however he might and heading straight for Italy, some civilized European country where being British still counted for something. Naturally Sebastian had never actually been to Cambridge. He’d flunked out of a third-rate technical college but come on, isn’t a chap allowed a little leeway ?
    And weak — no one knew better than he how lily-livered he was. As a child, he’d seen the movie The Four Feathers ; that was him without the end heroics and redemption. He got by on his diminishing trust fund, wonderful manners, sheer culture and, dammit, his boyish good looks. No one, he knew this, no one could do that toss of the black lustrous hair, the vulnerable little-boy-lost look better than he. He had nothing else going for him, he knew that, but with a little luck he’d been hoping it would, at the bloody least, net him one of those rich dumb Americans of which the States seemed to produce a never-ending supply.
    She was hammering his back. Damn it all, his back was fragile, old rugger injury. Okay, he never played, but he did follow the game all right.
    She was screeching, “Here, you dumb fook.”
    Crikey, her language was simply appalling.
    They dropped ol’ Georgios off the cliff and Sebastian, nigh hysterical now, wanted to shout, as the body hit the ocean, Beware of Greeks bearing cellophane . And he thought, dammit, he might just yet write the great Brit novel. Evelyn Waugh, eat your bitter heart out.

Three
    Hell hath no fury like a mystery writer... dropped.
    Paula Segal was nervous, not a feeling she liked having. She laughed to herself, thinking, Feeling Nervous , she might use that for a title. Or Twisted Feelings ? Or maybe Hard Feelings — someone else had probably already used that but fuck him, you couldn’t copyright a title. Then she sighed and said out loud, “Bad joke.” Like she was ever going to have a shot at titling another book.
    She was meeting her agent for lunch, not dinner. You knew when they moved you from dinner to lunch, you were semi-fucked, only one unearned-out advance away from a fast latte in Starbucks. Just ask that poor Irish bastard who’d been hot for all of ten minutes. Jesus, he’d had more agents than lattes and look at him now. He couldn’t even make a panel at the U.K. Festivals.
    She checked her rankings on Amazon — nothing better than 500,000. And worse, she’d gotten yet another shitty review from Booklist .
    The thing was, she knew she was good. She had three good mysteries under her belt, one nominationfor the Barry — she’d lost to Tess Gerritsen, but that was no biggie, everyone lost to Tess — and Laura Lippman had promised her a blurb. Even Val McDermid had smiled at her that time in Toronto.
    But she’d been termed “midlist” when she’d started out and more recently had slipped to “cult.” Cult equaled nada, sorry, hon. She just didn’t get it. She thought only those creepy noir guys got demoted to cult. She’d never even written a short story for Akashic.
    She seriously didn’t understand why her books hadn’t done better. She wrote what she thought was a nice blend of cozy and medium-boiled.