Durance Vile

Randy Crocker owned a burger joint in El Cerrito, California, finding a lot of satisfaction working there as a short-order cook. Last year, he finally convinced his unemployed daughter Cissie to come cashier for him in the evenings to make a couple of extra bucks. What he didn't know is that Cissie exploited her front-of-house position so she could more effectively deal Adderall. When Randy finds out, heads will roll.Once, Cath Shapeero was an unadventurous, rule-following Ph.D. student in European history at an Ivy League university, but once her research grant brings her to the Continent, her whole life changed. She met Pauline Garance, a devil-may-care researcher from Lyons, and in the years that followed she turned Cath's world upside-down. Now Cath is learning things she finds far more interesting than the Princely House of Thurn and Taxis.Ten-year-old Garland Mathers Ouwerx had never wanted for a thing, but when his mother, the Belgian ambassador to Russia in Moscow, was killed in a bombing incident that also took the lives of his father and sixteen other diplomats, Garland's only living family member took in the despondent ten-year-old boy: his significantly less wealthy aunt Aitana in Mexico City. It took Garland 45 years to leave that city; when he arrives in San Francisco, nothing is left of the boy he once was.In Durance Vile, these three people never meet. They play only minor roles in its globe-sweeping narrative that involves entirely different events; you will never know the rest of their stories.