Blackbirds

Miriam Black can tell when you're going to die. She'd actually rather not know, but it only takes a bit of skin on skin contact and she knows when, of what and maybe a bit of where. A nicely packaged vision that only takes a couple of seconds real time but lasts for as long as it needs to to show her the details.

The book opens with Miriam waiting for an unpleasant specimen of a man to die in a motel room so she can rifle through his wallet and take enough money to get a few more dinners & a few more motel rooms. This is how she lives, hitch-hiking around the US, surviving rather than living. She's got a foul mouth and an attitude and underneath the bluster she's broken but she'll be damned if she lets anyone else see. The story is told both moving forward from the opening scene and through a series of flashbacks & dreams & other people's stories. Miriam meets a trucker (who she actually likes, not a common occurrence) who'll die in a particularly gruesome murder with her name on his lips - the climax of the thriller plot line. And a con man who has a proposition for her, and who isn't nearly as clever as he thinks he is. The flashbacks & dreams tell us how Miriam got here, why she's broken & on the road and give hints as to how her power works & where it came from (as far as she knows).

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