What were the authors thinking?
The confidence in his smile… that smile that pulled me in like ice cream melting down a cone.
With  the broken sob of a candy mugged infant, Brett rolled across the bed  into the recently vacated hollow – a depression created by the recently  departed Maria.

Gerald  began – but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten  percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for  them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by  searing lava or suffocated by choking ash – to pee.

Danny,  the little Grizzly cub, frolicked in the tall grass on this sunny  Spring morning, his mother keeping a watchful eye as she chewed on a  piece of a hiker they had encountered the day before.

As he  stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg  carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold,  aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil  dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter  seven of the shop manual.

Racing through space at unimaginable speeds, Capt. Dimwell could only imagine how fast his spaceship was going.

When  Detective Riggs was called to investigate the theft of a trainload of  Native American fish broth concentrate bound for market, he solved the  case almost immediately, being that the trail of clues led straight to the trainmaster, who had both the locomotive and the Hopi tuna tea.

India, which hangs like a wet washcloth from the towel rack of Asia, presented  itself to Tex as he landed in Delhi (or was it Bombay?), as if it mattered because Tex finally had an idea to make his mark and fortune and that idea was a chain of steak houses to serve the millions and he wondered, as he deplaned down the steep, shiny, steel steps, why no one had thought of it before.