“It’s interesting to note that there are two groups of people who are rarely, if ever, suspected of murder. These groups are elderly women and little girls. On the whole, when it comes to murder, the stats very much favor the men. The odd woman is thrown into the mix every now and again, but she’s inevitably perimenopausal (and having been through the change myself, certainly understand why). But an elderly woman or little girl committing murder? It’s one in a million. I’ve always liked to think I was special.”

“The Malicarn. The sixteenth winter in the reign of Queen Hannah. At night the master would invite the journeymen and apprentices to supper with his family, and that is where Buck first heard real tales of the old wars. How there used to be hundreds of wizards, how the old king Prion, himself once just a lowly sheepherder, became the one to unite them against the Dark Mages, how the many men of the Malicarn were called to fight.”

“When they built the retirement property on Maui then, and he told her abruptly and without warning that he wanted to sell their other houses, the prospect frightened her."

“Alfred, the youngest, blond, stubborn, and adventurous. Inez, the middle child, blue-eyed, a dreamer who heard music in the woods no one else could, and who could replay it by memory on her violin. And Marguerite, the eldest who even before she’d mastered her alphabet, invented feral dances and rambling plays, persuading her siblings to perform alongside her for their parents and the nanny and footmen and maids.”

“Stephen Rensselaer was named after the famous and sometimes infamous Hudson Valley Stephen Van Rensselaers of earlier times. But years before Annapolis, and perhaps why he chose the Naval Academy, he came to associate his first name with that of Stephen Decatur, the youngest captain in the Navy’s history and the hero of the Barbary Wars, whose life was heroic but whose death was not. Neither the Barbary pirates nor the British were able to killStephen Decatur.”

“Alice. July 5, 1976. The first time Alice saw them, they were walking side by side on the narrow gravel road that led into the RV park and campground. A boy and girl, moving together in a slow, slouching way with his arm around her shoulders, and her hand tucked into the back pocket of his bell-bottoms. His army-style backpack looked heavy, the seams stretching, a rolled-up orange sleeping bag tied to the bottom.”

“In a blinding flash, a frightening memory materialized in Gessner’s consciousness. She now realized where her physical body was lying at this very instant…and, even more terrifying, what was being done to her. She was on her back, tightly strapped into a machine she herself had created. A monster stood over her."

“It’s…nice.” Max didn’t sound like he meant it. He hadn’t picked Vista View—that would be Alice again. We were standing a few feet from the entrance, watching a fake waterfall trickle over fake river rock, trying to work up the resolve to go inside. Upstairs, movers were arranging what remained of my furniture without me, but I couldn’t seem to get past the forecourt.”

“This book was born on a cold, drizzly, late spring day when I clambered over the split-rail cedar fence that surrounds my pasture and made my way through wet woods to the modest frame house where Joe Rantz lay dying….”

“Upstairs, Lisavet,” he said, reaching into his coat for the pocket watch. The old familiar brass was slick in his palm. His fingers fumbled over the crown until it clicked into place, and he flungopen the door. What had once been their cozy, two-room apartment was instead a silent cavern of shadows. “I want you to wait in there. Stay right there by this door.”