There was still so much leftover spaghetti, I thought with a heavy heart as I drove home, and still I found myself turning down the road where the dingy little Chinese place was, in the crook of the valley, where I gave my order to the unsmiling woman in a hairnet at her window. We should have been on a first-name basis by now, I thought, as I sat to wait, trying to warm my hands on a cup of watery tea. I’d been her regular customer for at least twenty years, but instead things seemed to be progressing in the opposite direction: if she had once been merely indifferent, now she was unmistakably hostile.

At home, I opened the waxed paper boxes: green beans swimming in red oil, noodles in a brown sauce, a pea-flecked, perfectly level block of fried rice. I ate too quickly, and then felt thirsty, a little sickly, and in an unpleasant mood. I could not be expected to think of my father now, I told myself, for god’s sake a man must have a break. Also, I thought, it was time to stop pretending I might eat the rest of the spaghetti. I hoisted the pot above the sink and watched as the noodles clumped sluggishly down the drain. I should not have made so much, I thought, as I ran the hot water and the garbage disposal. I filled a tall glass with cloudy water from the tap and took it to the bedroom, where I brushed my teeth, changed my clothes, installed myself under the covers, and opened my book.

The detective and his colleagues had left the Arctic islands, so that was a relief. Now there were some pages devoted to another questionable subplot—the one about the detective’s friend, who owned the boarding facility for racehorses. He and the detective had been great friends in their youth and now the detective was eager to reconnect, although the friend, so far, appeared significantly less interested. The only eyewitness to the murder, incidentally, had been the victim’s horse. As far as the investigation went, it was just as irrelevant as the islands interlude, but for some reason I minded it less. My intention had been to read until I felt sleepy and then turn out the light, but instead I found that the more I read, the more awake I began to feel, and alongside it a growing sense that the key to the whole book, the beginning of the end of the investigation, as it were, was close at hand. When the part about the racehorse-keeping friend drew to a close, the book entered a moody, somewhat aimless passage that seemed to me to be signaling clearly what it was, that sequence so familiar to all readers of the genre: the little lull in the action before the killer is revealed.