Authors: Michael Gruber
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense
Valley of Bones (47 page)
“Plate o’ shrimp,” said Lorna with a laugh. “The old voodoo man’s trying to scare me,” but she stopped laughing when the phone rang. They both stared at the cordless on the table. It rang and rang, but neither of them was in any hurry to pick it up.
The poems attributed to the fictional poet Willa Shaftel in this novel are real poems written by a real poet named Jane Hirshfield, who has never had anything to do with a policeman in Miami. They are printed in her book
Given Sugar, Given Salt,
and are used in this way with her permission.
The Dinka of the Sudan are real people, and their words and customs are as described here, following closely the report by their own Dr. Francis Mading Deng in his book
The Dinka of the Sudan
. The sufferings of the Dinka under the Sudanese government are also real and were for decades unrelieved by God or anyone else. There is indeed oil in the Sudan, although I hope none where I said there was, and it has been a prime cause of the monstrous thirty years war in that land.
M
ICHAEL
G
RUBER,
whose
Tropic of Night
immediately established him as a member of the very highest order of today’s crime novelists, lives in Seattle with his wife, an artist. He is currently completing a third novel featuring Jimmy Paz, and a children’s novel,
The Witch’s Boy,
which will be published by HarperCollins in Spring 2005.
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Tropic of Night
Cover artist Eric Fuentecilla
Jacket design by Eric FuentecillaJacket photographs: Rearview mirror by Nancy R. Cohen/Getty Images; cemetery © by Kevin Leigh/Index Stock Imagery; palm trees © by Pete Starman/Photonica
Greatful acknowledgment is made to reprint the following:
From
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed © 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
From
Given Sugar, Given Salt
by Jane Hirshfield, copyright © 2001 by Jane Hirshfield. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
From
Gravity and Grace
by Simone Weil, translated by Arthur Wills, copyright 1952, renewal © 1980 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Original French copyright 1947 by Librairie Plon. Used by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
VALLEY OF BONES.
Copyright © 2005 by Michael Gruber. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2004 ISBN: 9780061807916
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gruber, Michael, 1940–
Valley of bones : a novel / Michael Gruber.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-057766-5
FIRST EDITION
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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