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.