Teaser Tuesday 11/26/2013: “Subpoena Colada”

Still reading Subpoena Colada this week, in which our hero, a frequently-drunken lawyer (is there any other kind in fiction?), is trying to salvage the wreckage of his career and that of his highest-profile client, the apparently washed-up rock star Brian Fey (or as I keep thinking of him, Bryan Ferry — who I am NOT calling washed-up, so don’t start hating), who is being taken to the cleaners by a lawsuit from his former band-mates and who is, apparently, about to become a suspect in the murder of his replacement. Sort of like if Peter Gabriel had been suspected of killing Phil Collins, I guess.

The usual crowd is here: media figureheads, record company A&R, the young and the beautiful, the old and the rich. I look around: Richard Branson and Chris Evans; Liam and Noel Gallagher; Sharleen Spiteri and Sophie Ellis Bextor; Jodie Kidd and Sophie Dahl; Gail Porter and Jade Jagger; Rachel Hunter and Patsy Kensit; David Baddiel and Steve Coogan; hip young things from the soaps.

Dang, that’s a lot of name-dropping! Sharleen Spiteri is, of course, the lead singer of the Scottish band Texas, which last.fm tells me is my favorite band. (Why is a Scottish band named “Texas”? Evidently they’re fans of the film “Paris, Texas”, which I haven’t seen.) Anyway, the book doesn’t really go into what happens after the party, although one might surmise the Gallaghers get into a fistfight, most likely with each other.

Speaking of things happening after a party, here’s a new scene I’m adding to The War of the Ravels, in which Mercy attempts to demonstrate her ability to open dimensional portals on an unfortunate piece of undercooked steak.

She could tell when the gateway started to open; the strings that underlay the room changed, sending a little shiver through the skin of reality. At almost the same moment, she heard Aldric hiss a warning and, wondering if he felt it the change as well, she opened her eyes, just in time to see the innkeeper’s pet cat-thing bound in through the door to the verandah—which evidently had been left ajar—and leap toward the table, and the piece of meat. But it was too late to stop the window from opening; the crack was made, the split in the world was there, the meat was falling through it. And Trouble went after it, both of them disappearing through a blank nothing, to be followed, a moment later, by the knife, tipped off balance by the animal’s passage.

Yes, I named someone’s pet in my fantasy novel after the late, lamented Trouble the Kitty. If you’d like to make something of it, take it up with her.