Jessie couldn’t face another day living with the memory of what had happened to her. She begged me-begged me-to help her to end it. As her friend, as someone who loved her, as the only person to whom she’d speak, how could I deny her that release? Who would doubt that story, knowing what she’d gone through?

I could get off with a light sentence, I knew, once I explained. No one would ever need to know the truth, right?

I was just starting to breathe a little easier when the door opened and my father walked in. He’d seen the story on TV-who in the tristate area had not?-and he’d come down to the station.

But he’d not come to comfort me, or even to ask me why.

His gaze was just as cold as it had been when, as a child, I’d disappointed him in some fashion. I wasn’t surprised, frankly, that there’d be no attempt at understanding. There never had been in the past.

In his hands, he held a blue envelope. The same blue envelope I’d left in his mailbox earlier.

“Daddy,” I said, ever the coward, holding out my shaking hands, silently pleading for him to give it to me.

But Judge Lucas Bradley-Judge Luke “Hang ’Em High” Bradley-handed the letter over to you. I guess there were other instincts that were stronger in him, other bonds harder to break than the one that existed between father and daughter.

Signed this date: Deanna Jean Bradley

When Detective Mallory Russo finished reading the last page of the statement, she held it up in one hand and said, “You haven’t signed it.”

“I will.” The young woman held out her hand for the pen.

The detective and the once promising assistant district attorney stared at each other from across the table.

“You could have come to me, Dee,” Mallory told her. “You could have given me the information and we could have gone after these guys. It didn’t have to be this way.”

“Yes, it did, Mallory. And may I remind you that none of you were too interested in them even as I was picking them off.” The A.D.A. shifted in her seat. “Besides, everything that happened…it was all my fault. It wasn’t your fight.”

“They’re all my fights,” Mallory told her. “We’ve known each other for years, Dee. Why couldn’t you have trusted me to take them down?”

Deanna shrugged, her eyes shifting to the two-way window on the opposite side of the room.

“Is he still there, watching? My father?”

“Judge Bradley left an hour ago.” Mallory rested her arms on the table.

“You know, he could have burned my letter, he could have kept it and held it over my head for the rest of my life.” Deanna Bradley continued to stare at the mirror. “I still can’t believe he turned against me.”

“Your father has an unswerving sense of justice,” Mallory reminded her. “He’s always going to follow his conscience.”

“So will I, Mal.” Deanna sighed. “So will I…”

David Hewson knows where to find the perfect black rice in Barcelona, the richest coffee in Venice and how to kill a person in a thousand gruesome ways. His wonderful series set in Rome, featuring detective Nic Costa and his stand-alone thrillers share an authentic sense of place, characters with rich lives that began long before you picked up the book and a relentless sense of pacing that pulls you into their world.

“The Circle” is a perfectly symmetrical tale that shatters our comfortable isolation from current events. Through the eyes of a young pregnant woman we see the world from a new perspective as a train carries her from a state of innocence into a state of fear. Hold on tight, because like it or not, every one of us is already along for the ride.

The Tube line ran unseen beneath the bleak, unfeeling city, around and around, day and night, year after year. Under the wealthy mansions of Kensington the snaking track rattled, through cuttings and tunnels, to the bustling mainline stations of Paddington, Euston and King’s Cross, where millions came and left London daily, invisible to those below the earth. Then the trains traveled on to the poorer parts in the east, Aldgate, with its tenements and teeming immigrant populations, until the rails turned abruptly, as if they could take the poverty no more, and longed to return to the prosperous west, to civilization and safety, before the perpetual loop began again.

The Circle. Melanie Darma had traveled this way so often she sometimes imagined she was a part of it herself.

Today she felt tired. Her head hurt as she slumped on the worn, grubby seat in the noisy, rattling carriage, watching the station lights flash by, the faces of the travelers come and go. Tower Hill, Monument, Cannon Street, Mansion House…Somewhere to the south ran the thick, murky waters of the Thames. She remembered sitting next to her father as a child, bewildered in a shaking train from Charing Cross to Waterloo, a stretch that ran deep beneath the old, gray river. Joking, he’d persuaded her to press her nose to the grimy windows to look for passing fish, swimming in the blackness flashing by. On another occasion, when he was still as new to the city as she was, in thrall to its excitement and possibilities, they’d both got out at the station called Temple, hoping to see something magical and holy, finding nothing but surly commuters and tangles of angry traffic belching smoke.

This was the city, a thronging, anonymous world of broken promises. People, millions of them, whatever the time of day. Lately, with her new condition, they would watch on the train as she moved heavily, clutching the swelling bundle in her belly. Most would stand aside and give her a seat. A few would smile, mothers mostly, she thought. Some, men in business suits, people from the City, stared away as if the obvious extent of her state, and the apparent nearness of her release from it, amounted to some kind of embarrassment to be avoided. She could almost hear them praying…if it’s to happen please, God, let it not be this instant, when I’ve a meeting scheduled, a drink planned, an assignation with a lover. Anytime but now.

She sat the way she had learned over the previous months: both hands curved protectively around the bump in her fawn summer coat, which was a little heavy for the weather, bought cheaply at a street market to encompass her temporary bulk. Her fingers felt comfortable there nevertheless. It was as if this was what they were made for.

So much of her life seemed to have been passed in these tunnels, going to and fro. She felt she could fix her position on the Circle’s endless loop by the smell of the passengers as they entered the carriage: sweet, cloying perfume in the affluent west, the sweat of workmen around King’s Cross, the fragrant, sometimes acrid odor of the Indians and Pakistanis from the sprawling, struggling ethic communities of the east. Once she’d visited the museum in Covent Garden to try to understand this hidden jugular that kept the city alive, uncertainly at times, as its age and frailty began to show. Melanie Darma had gazed at the pictures of imperious Victorian men in top hats and women in crinoline dresses, all waiting patiently in neat lines for miniature trains with squat smokestacks and smiling crews. It was the first underground railway ever built, part of a lost and entirely dissimilar age.

When the London bombers struck in 2005 they chose the Circle Line as their principal target, through accident, she thought, not from any conscious attempt to strike at history. Fourteen people died in two separate explosions. The entire system was closed for almost a month, forcing her to take buses, watching those around her nervously, glancing at anyone with dark skin and a backpack, wondering.

She might have been on one of those two carriages had it not been for her father’s terminal sickness, a cruel cancerous death eked out on a hard, cheap bed in some cold public ward, one more body to be rudely nursed toward its end by a society that no longer seemed to care. Birth, death, illness, accident…Sudden, fleeting joy, insidious, lasting tragedy…All these things lay in wait on the journey that was life, with ambushes, large and small, waiting hidden in the wings.