Winter's Quick Fix

Harry knows the system.

He has been navigating it for thirty years—the halfway houses, the vocational workshops, and the intake rooms with their clipboards and orange plastic chairs. He knows which hospital has the best food, which evenings run the thinnest staff, and exactly what to say to a tired intern at two in the morning.

When winter comes down hard, and the math stops working, Harry has a plan. It is quiet, deliberate, and has worked three times before. It involves a jewelry store on a nearly empty main street, a bulge in a jacket pocket that may or may not be anything, a woman whose hands will shake, and a bench in the snow to sit on while she makes the call.

Winter's Quick Fix is a novella about a man who has never committed a real crime in his life—and who understands, without bitterness, the difference between what the law calls robbery and what a man does when he has run out of other options.

With compassion, precision, and zero sentimentality, P.A. Farrell brings Harry to life as one of fiction's most quietly unforgettable characters: agreeable, intelligent, entirely without options, and perfectly at peace with who he is. His story asks what it means that the warmest place a person can find in February is a psychiatric ward—and what that says about every other option he was given.

Perfect for readers of literary fiction who want to feel something real.