Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling

"Sixteen unseeing stone of disheveled male slammed into her; Robin was knocked off her feet and catapulted backwards, handbag flying, arms windmilling, towards the void beyond the lethal staircase."

"The act of shopping for what he needed, and of setting up the bare necessities for himself, had lulled Strike back into the familiar soldierly state of doing what needed to be done, without question or complaint."

"In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted"

"Ridiculous," he said breathlessly. "You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing."

"You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing, Strike"

"Im.’ The monosyllable was heavy with contempt. ‘’E’s a twat.’‘Is he?’‘Yeah, ’e is. Ask Kieran.’She gave the impression that she and Kieran stood together, sane, dispassionate observers of the idiots populating Lula’s world."

"He had hoped to spot the flickering shadow of a murderer as he turned the file's pages, but instead it was the ghost of Lula herself who emerged, gazing up at him, as victims of violent crimes sometimes did, through the detritus of their interrupted lives."

"He knew more about the death of Lula Landry than he had ever meant or wanted to know; the same would be true of virtually any sentient being in Britain. Bombarded with the story, you grew interested against your will, and before you knew it, you were so well informed, so opinionated about the facts of the case, you would have been unfit to sit on a jury."

"Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?"

"One of the earliest and most vivid memories of Robin’s childhood was of the day that the family dog had been put down. She herself had been too young to understand what her father was saying; she took the continuing existence of Bruno, her oldest brother’s beloved Labrador, for granted. Confused by her parents’ solemnity, she had turned to Stephen for a clue as to how to react, and all security had crumbled, for she had seen, for the first time in her short life, happiness and comfort drain out of his small and merry face, and his lips whiten as his mouth fell open. She had heard oblivion howling in the silence that preceded his awful scream of anguish, and then she had cried, inconsolably, not for Bruno, but for the terrifying grief of her brother."

"In spite of her plainness that would have made wallflowers of other women, she radiated a great sense of self-importance."

"Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country."

"There were friends all over London who would welcome his eagerly to their homes, who would throw open their guest rooms and their fridges, eager to condole and to help. The price of all of those comfortable beds and home-cooked meals, however, would be to sit at kitchen tables, once the clean-pajamaed children were in bed, and relive the filthy final battle with Charlotte, submitting to the outraged sympathy and pity of his friends' girlfriends and wives. To this he preferred grim solitude, a Pot Noodle and a sleeping bag."

"It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness." Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow's mother... sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart."

"She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus' takes you over. It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nill"

"Couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself."

"The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them."

"How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?"

"How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life."