It wasn't the sex they had gotten that out of the way. 'She remembered how terrified she had been on their wedding night.

'Even if you take yourself away from the person who holds you fast, if that person still thinks you are his, you always will be.' 'She wondered if forgiving was any easier than forgetting.' If you really love someone, I think you have to take them back.' But now I look at you, and I dream about her, and I see that I've been wrong. 'Three months ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that if you really loved someone, you'd let them go. And if these were one and the same, you were damned.' The first person you made love with stole your soul. 'She remembered once hearing a song that said the first person you fell in love with stole your heart. 'I don't know about him, but I understand doing something you know you shouldn't be doing, and knowing at the same time it's not wrong.' 'He understood for the first time how if you believed you belonged to someone, no piece of paper or priest's benediction could make it any more real.' You saw it in the grass and the trees and the road signs and you could not imagine that you had spent so many years of your life in the absence of this hue, which seemed to make the rest of the world fall into place.' Making love with her was a bit like waking up one morning to discover the color green. 'The first night had been something he would never be able to put into words.

'She promised, and she clenched her fists tight into his soaking shirt in an effort to hold on to the moment.'

Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly someone else sails along for the ride.' Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. 'You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. But was it murder, or mercy? It's a question that will divide the town as a heated murder trial blazes on, forcing them to face the hardest questions of the heart: when does love cross the line of moral obligation? And what does it mean to truly love another? MAD.

THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'We defy you not to be gripped' Glamour As police chief of a small town, Cameron McDonald makes the toughest arrest of his life when his own cousin Jamie comes to him and confesses outright that he has killed his terminally ill wife. What would you do for someone you loved? Lie? Leave? Kill? Woven tight with passion and a fast-paced plot, MERCY explores highly charged emotional and ethical issues.

Mercy by Jodi Picoult