Deus ex Machina

By Sparkle Hayter

"Sparkle Hayter's Deus ex Machina . . . exploits the conventions of the crime story and the new realities of Paris in a roller coaster from suicide to murder to resolution that is quite simply a lot of fun to read." International Noir Fiction

"A delectable moveable feast." The Telegraph

Please note covers are temporary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sparkle Hayter
• Release date: Mar 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301219483

Sparkle Hayter

Sparkle Hayter has been a journalist for CNN and other news organizations, a stringer in Afghanistan, a producer in Bollywood, a stand-up comic in New York, a caretaker for an elderly parent in Canada, and a novelist of seven books. And some other things that are kind of a blur now. The first novel in her Robin Hudson Mystery series, What’s a Girl Gotta Do?, is the recipient of the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for best first mystery novel, and the series is a winner of the Sherlock Award for Best Comic Detective. Hayter’s articles have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Nation, and New Woman. She currently lives in Canada with her rescued Nepali street dog, Alice, and is working on a new book.

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By Sparkle Hayter

Copyright by Sparkle Hayter 2006

All rights reserved

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ISBN: 9781301219483

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Deus ex Machina

A Short Story about Hope

Paris, 2006

Going through a rough time in a happy and beautiful place like Paris puts one’s misery in sharp relief. The more luminous and prosperous Paris looks, the more Shay feels excluded from it. Her self-pity steadily darkens that winter despite her earnest efforts to make her dismal state of affairs romantic, invoking the spirits of great writers forged by poverty and depression. After all, while Hemingway was poor, he found a moveable feast. Orwell, down and out in Paris, scratching with bugs from old grey mattresses in flop hotels, sick from the stench of sulphur burned to try to keep the insects down, found in it all the brilliance to become a great writer. Then there was the composer Virgil Thomson, an intimate of Gertrude Stein and Miss Toklas, who once said, glibly, that he preferred to be poor in Paris rather than America because ‘I’d rather starve in a place with good food.’

Shay tries to be buoyed by that philosophy but now she wonders if it isn’t better to starve in a place with bad food, where the warm gusts of air and laughter escaping through restaurant doors on cold winter nights are scented with less delicious flavors and don’t remind her how long it has been since