How I Celebrate a Synopsis

Yeah, the dreaded synopsis. I finished mine for Loathsome, Dark, and Deep yesterday, and to celebrate, I:

1. made beef stew for dinner (yum)
2. drank a bottle of Smithwick's in a chilled pint glass with the stew (double yum)
3. read As the City Sleeps by Stephen T. Johnson to my boys

Okay, As the City Sleeps is the book that should have been written during my childhood.

From the jacket:

Imagine that you are all alone in the sleeping city.
It is is very late at night.

And a quote as inscription:

Night, the beloved.
Night, when words fade and things come alive.

(Antoine de Saint Exupéry)

Oh, joyous shivers. The book is (sadly) out of print. But you must track down a copy. You. Must.

I can't help feeling the first paragraph of Loathsome needs a little tweeking:

For almost six years after Maggie’s death, I’d drowned myself with bourbon on the porch of the only whorehouse in Ecola, Oregon. The will to make a story with what life I had left was gone, vanished beneath the dark boughs of war and betrayal, friends dead and lovers lost. Perhaps the constant haze in which I spent my evenings stunted my voice. Perhaps too much bourbon burned my throat and ruined it, ruined my ability to spin a story just right. But there was safety at the bottom of a glass and a certainty to the numbness I felt all of those evenings as night clamped down her hard, cold fist--a certainty I hadn’t even found in death--not until I turned headfirst into the dark forest, and the bleak hearts of men peeled before me like rotten apples.

Suggestions?