The Karma Booth. Jeff Pearce

      THE KARMA BOOTH

      JEFF PEARCE

      HarperVoyager an imprint of

      HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street,

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2015

      Copyright © Jeff Pearce 2015

      Cover photographs © Shutterstock 2015, Cover design © HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd 2015

      Jeff Pearce asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

      Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008101190

      Version 2015-02-25

      For Blair Cosgrove. My friend, my brother.

      Table of Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

      

       Chapter Six

      

       Chapter Seven

      

       Chapter Eight

      

       Chapter Nine

      

       Chapter Ten

      

       Chapter Eleven

      

       Chapter Twelve

      

       Chapter Thirteen

      

       Chapter Fourteen

      

       Chapter Fifteen

      

       Chapter Sixteen

      

       Chapter Seventeen

      

       Chapter Eighteen

      

       Chapter Nineteen

      

       Chapter Twenty

      

       Chapter Twenty-One

      

       Chapter Twenty-Two

      

       Chapter Twenty-Three

      

       Chapter Twenty-Four

      

       Chapter Twenty-Five

      

       About the Author

      

       About the Publisher

       CHAPTER ONE

      They used the word execute for Emmett Nickelbaum, and even though he was the first to experience the procedure, no one would ever think of him as a pioneer. Emmett Nickelbaum was the first death row inmate to go. He was to be exterminated, eradicated, expunged.

      They had a harder time describing what happened after the execution—and what terminology to use for the new arrival.

      Emmett Nickelbaum was a thirty-eight-year-old mechanic. Caucasian, born and raised on the edge of Morningside Heights in New York City, back when it wasn’t impossible for a family to rent there, and he stood six foot four and had a build like a massive wall of solid, turn-of-the-century yellow brick. His coworkers at