Excerpt from The Breaker by Minette Walters, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

before returning to what interested him most, her opened legs and what lay between them. He crawled forward on his elbows, writhing his body.

"What are you doing?" demanded Danny suspiciously, crawling up beside him. "Are you being dirty?"

"'Course not." He gave the boy a savage thump on the arm. "That's all you ever think about, isn't it? Being dirty. You'd better watch it, penis-brain, or I'll tell Dad on you."

In the inevitable fight that followed_a grunting, red-faced brawl of hooked arms and kicking feet_the Zeiss binoculars slipped from the elder brother's grasp and clattered down the slope, dislodging an avalanche of shale in the process. The boys, united in terror of what their father was going to say, abandoned the fight to wriggle back from the brink and stare in dismay after the binoculars.

"It's your fault if they're broken," hissed the ten-year-old. "You're the one who dropped them."

But for once his brother didn't rise to the bait. He was more interested in the body's continued immobility. With an awful sense of foreboding it dawned on him that he'd been masturbating over a dead woman.

Reprinted from The Breaker Minette Walters by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright 1999 by Minette Walters.