Book Samples

The true story behind The Echo Thief

This book took me twenty years to write.

Twenty years.

You'd think I was trying to build the damn city myself.

I never set out to become a novelist. I worked road construction in Salt Lake City, Utah. I ran crews, hauled liquid asphalt, plowed snow in the winter. Hard work, long days, and I was pretty damn good at it.

I liked working.

I liked coming home tired because I'd actually done something.

Then, when I was twenty-five, I got bladder cancer.

That'll change...

CHAPTER ONE

The Wrong Reflection

The mag-cup under my left boot makes a noise I don’t like.

A thin electric whine. High, irritated, getting worse.

I shift my weight onto the right foot and tighten my grip on the maintenance cable. Below me, the drowned district waits with all the warmth of an open grave.

From up here the city looks clean. Forty floors down, the rust eats through everything.

Rain needles the back of my neck. Wind jerks at my jacket, pressing the emergency stabilizer between my...

CHAPTER ONE

THE WEIGHT YOU DON’T PUT DOWN

I don’t talk about my brother much.

Not because I don’t want to. Because if I start, he doesn’t shut up.

He’s been dead six years. Here’s how that went.

Room 317 was never quiet. The monitor chirping along with Billy’s heart. The fluorescent tube over his bed buzzing like it was trying to give me cancer on purpose. A vending machine down the hall that dropped a can every forty minutes whether anybody paid or not. Three days in that chair and I’d stopped...

Billy slipped his arm around my shoulders.

We started walking.

After a while, he looked over.

"You gonna be okay, little brother?"

I thought about lying.

Telling him I was fine. Making some stupid joke so he wouldn't worry.

Instead, I told him the truth.

"I don't know."

He nodded.

"That's okay."

We walked another block.

Then I stopped.

"Billy?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for bringing me."

He looked back toward the empty street.

Then at me.

"Anytime, little brother."

I smiled.

And we kept walking.

I don't remember when...