Reading progress update: I've read 3 out of 294 pages.

How is this for an opening paragraph?
I AM GOING to kill a man. I don’t know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him …
You must pardon me this melodramatic opening, gentle reader. It sounds just like a first sentence out of one of my own detective novels, doesn’t it? Only this story is never going to be published, and the ‘gentle reader’ is a polite convention. No, not perhaps just a polite convention. I propose to commit what the world calls ‘a crime’.
Well, I am excited.