Marlow Quaid

She grew up over a parade of shops and books what she knows: cities, trades, and people who are good with their hands. She watched a room where a man spends four hours with his hand on a stranger's ribs, telling her when to breathe and when she can have a break, and thought it was the most obviously erotic arrangement she had ever seen and nobody was writing it. Her Black heroes are specific men with families, workshops, debts and taste — never a fantasy of danger, never a lesson for the heroine.