Six Degrees of Separation is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month’s chain begins with Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies.  I haven’t read it but apparently it is a novel about a marriage.

So my first book in the chain is also a book about a married couple. It is Before the Fact by Francis Iles. First published in 1932 this is a Golden Age crime fiction novel that is a psychological character study of its two main characters, Lina and Johnnie.  ‘Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband for nearly eight years before she realized that she was married to a murderer.’

The Marriage Lie by Kimberly Belle is another psychological thriller and is also about a marriage. Iris thought her marriage to Will was perfect until a plane en route to Seattle crashed. Everyone on board was killed and, according to the airline, Will was one of the passengers – but he had told her he was going to Florida. Why did he lie? This is one of those books that gripped me and kept me guessing all the way through. It has one of the most convoluted and complex plots I’ve read in a while. The pace is terrific and the tension just builds and builds.

Wreckage by Emily Bleeker is also about a plane crash. Lillian Linden and Dave Hall spent two years on a deserted island in the South Pacific after their plane crashed into the sea. Like The Marriage Lie, this book revolves around lies. After their rescue Lillian and Dave are desperate to keep what really happened on the island a secret from their families. This is also a book about marriage.

Wreckage leads to the next book in the chain in which the sea and an island play a major role. It’s The Sea Detective by Mark Douglas-Hume (a Scottish author) set on the fictional island of Eilean Iasgaich. Cal McGill uses his knowledge of tides, winds and currents to solve mysteries, which helps in the investigation of the appearance of severed feet in trainers that had been washed on shore on islands miles apart.

The Ghosts of Altona is also by a Scottish author – Craig Russell. It’s the 7th book featuring Jan Fabel, the head of Hamburg’s Murder Commission and is set in Altona, one of the city boroughs. It’s a modern Gothic tale as well as being a crime thriller. Fabel’s first case as a detective is resurrected when the body of Monika Krone is found under a car park, fifteen years after she disappeared. And then there are more murders which Fabel thinks are linked to the discovery of Monika’s remains, all of men who were in the same Gothic set at university.

Ghosts are the last link in the chain with The Graveyard Book  by Neil Gaiman. This is the story of the baby who escapes a murderer intent on killing his entire family, and who stumbles into the local disused graveyard where he is rescued by ghosts. He is named by the ghosts, Nobody Owens, or Bod for short, and he grows up looked after by his adoptive parents Master and Mistress Owens who had been dead for a few hundred years and numerous other occupants of the graveyard. It’s scary and creepy, but never gory.

The links are that they are all mysteries of different types, with three of them about marriage. They are all about life and death and the fight between good and evil. And I had no idea when I began the chain that it would end in a ghostly graveyard.

Next month (March 4, 2017), the chain will begin with Nick Hornby’s memoir (or love letter to soccer), Fever Pitch – I think I have this book, but haven’t read it.