"Edghill,.Rosemary.-.Empty.Crown.Trilogy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Edghill Rosemary)

Naomi often said, which made her look like the better class of Flemish
Madonna; oval and even, with regular unexciting features and a small
pink mouth. Ruth was rather vain of that mouth, and bought it lipstick
far in excess of that which is deemed needful by proto-Librarians.

People had told Ruth she was sensible from the moment she had first
fallen into the toils of the educational system; so much so that by now
Ruth was ready for actions senseless and insensible.

Unfortunately, she didn't seem to have any talent for them at all.

After all, wasn't she on her way toward a Master's in library
sciencelibrary science, for God's sweet sake, was there anything more
sensible than that?

Sensible Ruth.

Sensible Ruth was out walking in the rain. Today was her birthday, and
Ruth was thirty. Thirty. All alone, and on the threshold of the rest
of her entire life, which would be spent solitary, virginal, and
depressed in some minuscule upstate New York library where the book was
on view between the hours of three and three-fifteen every other
Wednesday.

Such a depressing future called for ice cream at the very least, and
there was a Hdagen-Dazs shop on Broadway.

Ruth's Columbia-sponsored housing was on 116th Street between Broadway
and Riverside Drive, but the streets were fairly safe this close to the
college, even at night. Marooned by the changing demographic currents
of New York City, Columbia University stood like a last bastion of
Gilded Age Gotham in a sea of late-twentieth century chaos surrounded
by a moat of chichi restaurants and donut shops.

Ruth hesitated between ice cream and going to the Hunan Balcony and
really pigging out, but when Naomi got back from her martial arts class
she sometimes liked to cook. So Ruth contented herself (sensibly!)
with a pint of something that ought by rights to be called Death by
Chocolate and turned back toward the apartment.

The fine spring rain haloed everything and dampened her skin and
clothes like heavy dew. It made the slope of 116th Street slippery as
glass, and Ruth's attention was divided neatly between her footing and
the ice cream as she wended along.

But a New York pedestrian is nobody's fool. She had enough attention
left over to spot the body.

Ruth Marlowe, after some practice, was a good New Yorker. She'd lived
in New York since she'd come to Columbia three years ago with a fistful