No one would suspect the publishing world of murder....

A baseball-capped, bat-eared, tuberous Claymore resident was being interviewed. Chellis turned up the sound to hear him imputing the crime to a) terrorists, b) street gangs from Farclas (ha ha–at least we have streets), c) the baby-killing, pro-choice contingent, and d) his mother-in-law. Using the discordant conjunctions of the sub-literate–like, ya know, get it?–the guy was gumming together these stray strands of conspiracy theory into a single nut cluster. Chellis was placing his bets on the mother-in-law. Witches were once very useful for this sort of thing, but they’d gone out of fashion. No one would suspect the publishing world, barricaded behind their mountainous slush piles, of bumping someone off, but for all anyone knew, their office life could be as vicious as that of academe. Besides, murder required some competence, didn’t it? (Mrs. H frequently vented on the subject of publishing screw-ups.)

-- From Terry Griggs's Thought You Were Dead