And what is love, in the end?" Alabaster said. "Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else'… - Gabrielle Zevin

Los Angeles, especially when taken from a distance, was not a beautiful city, but she could will herself to be beautiful, if only for two weeks. Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.

I like all weddings, but isn't it particularly lovely when two grown-ups decide to get married?

CHIEF LAMBIASE IS a frequent visitor to the store, and to justify these visits, he buys books. Because Lambiase doesn't believe in wasting money, he reads the books, too. At first, he had mainly bought mass-market paperbacks — Jeffery Deaver and James Patterson (or whoever writes for James Patterson) — and then A.J. graduates him to trade paperbacks by Jo Nesbø and Elmore Leonard. Both authors are hits with Lambiase, so A.J. promotes him again to Walter Mosley and then Cormac McCarthy. A.J.'s most recent recommendation is Kate Atkinson's Case Histories.