Word: overhearer
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...executive would not covet the boons conferred on the depressed and integrity-ridden Will after he's nipped on the wrist by a rough beast slouching along a Vermont roadway? All his senses are suddenly sharpened: he can smell liquor on a colleague's breath at a dozen paces, overhear plotting phone calls far down the corridor, even -- literally -- sniff out his wife's affair with his chief rival (James Spader). He becomes, you might say, an animal in bed. And he, naturally, develops a taste for the jugular in matters of business...
...scariest aspect is that since we are characters in this fictional world, this fictional world has become our own reality. People who overhear our dining hall conversations-"Yeah, so after the time-traveling rice pulls a shotgun on me..."-often take their spicy waffle fries to another table...
...luck would have it, I speak loudly enough for a friend to overhear. "How bad are they?" he asks...
...supply lower-level dealers with pagers and cellular telephones that were difficult for narcs to overhear, Michael Harris set up a front company, Telesis Electrical Co. He even became a patron of the arts. His money- laundering theatrical production company invested $385,000 in the Broadway production of Checkmates, which ran for five months...
What appeals so strongly about Higgins' fiction may be that he lets the reader overhear men sizing up other men, judging them, often not gently. (Mostly men, yes; his women characters tend to be not much more than complications in the lives of their menfolk.) In The Progress of the Seasons, a 1989 book nominally about Boston's accursed Red Sox baseball team but mostly about the author's family, Higgins offers a shimmering truth: Irish Catholic males can't talk to one another about important personal matters. (Scandinavian Protestant males can't either, for the record...