"Savages" is his 13th and most boisterously stylish crime book, his gutsiest and most startling bid for attention.
The announcement, on February 4th, that forensic analysis had confirmed that a skeleton unearthed six feet under a social-services parking lot, in the English Midlands city of Leicester, was that of the fifteenth-century King Richard III excited a startling rush of media attention.
Instead, thousands of dead starlings rained down on the Griggstown section of Franklin Township a week ago, startling residents and drawing attention to federal agriculture officials who poisoned the birds after a farmer complained that his fields were under siege by the speckled feathered creatures.
There is the question of social-cum-geographical distance: alleged criminals from a low caste in a faraway town in a then notoriously backward state, Bihar, were much less likely to attract sympathy or prolonged attention, however startling the cruelty inflicted on them.
Once it learns that being touched in that location is a positive event, you'll be able to get the dog's attention without startling it.
Printed in black-letter type of an almost startling blackness, its pages command attention by means of a contrast too pronounced to be comfortable to the reader.
Some lesser athletes might feel it would be better just to win rather than fuel more attention with another startling performance.
When the music gets a bit samey, Walker pulls out a gently startling lyric to grab your attention back – "Naked ladies in the sunlight, they adore me," he offers on Sullen Mind.
The iPhone suicides and the kindergarten killings focussed attention on a startling fact, published last year in the British journal The Lancet: nearly one in five adults in China has a mental disorder, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a figure that put China in the ranks of the most mentally ill countries in the world.
