I’m a famous mystery novelist, power-walking enthusiast, and spunky widow who, despite my husband’s death, has not had my joie de vivre diminished in the slightest. Meeting me, perhaps you’d surmise that I’m a glass-half-full kind of gal who loves socializing, travel, and dinner with an ever-widening coterie of friends.
You’d be wrong. To make the most of my twilight years, I’ve cultivated a detached numbness to death that would give the grizzliest veteran of Guadalcanal the thousand-yard stare. This is because the people I’ve known have been murdered so often that I don’t feel anything anymore, not even when I find the dead body myself.
Nothing.
Well, perhaps that’s not true. I feel—it’s not quite excitement. It’s like when you leaf through the paltry reading material at the dentist’s office, and you discover that someone has neglected to fill out the People magazine crossword puzzle. So, I’m keeping busy, but I basically feel nothing.

