It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, 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 starts with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin a book I haven’t read. It’s the story of Sam and Sadie, who are both gamers, but according to Amazon this is not a romance but a story about love.

I’ve seen this reviewed in numerous places but never been tempted to read it until I read Kate’s review @ Books are my favourite and best. Like Kate I also thought it was about gaming and so not for me. But she explained that it wasn’t really about gaming but relationships, so maybe it could be.

Anyway, I’m starting my chain with a book with another character called Sadie. It’s The Search Party by Simon Lelic. Sixteen year old Sadie Saunders is missing and five of her friends set out into the woods to find her. At the same time the police’s investigation, led by Detective Inspector Robin Fleet and Detective Sergeant Nicola Collins, is underway.

My second link is to another crime fiction set in woods – In the Woods by Tana French. It’s set in Ireland mainly around an archaeological dig of a site prior to the construction of a motorway. Most of the wood that covered the land had already been cleared, but a small section remains. A little girl’s body is discovered on the site. Is her death connected to the disappearance of two twelve year-olds 20 years earlier? It’s Tana French’s debut novel.

My third link is to another debut novel – The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan. It’s a harrowing account of the atrocities of Srebrenica in 1995 and the search for justice forms the basis of this novel. Alongside that is the investigation by detectives Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty into the death of Christopher Drayton who fell from the heights of the Scarborough Bluffs, Ontario. Was it suicide, or an accident? Ausma Zehanat Khan is a Canadian author.

As is Sheena Kamal, whose book Eyes Like Mine, was also a debut novel. It’s a dark, compulsively readable psychological suspense novel. The main focus of the book is Nora, a recovering alcoholic, who works for a private investigation firm in Vancouver, and her search for her daughter, Bonnie, now a teenager, who she gave away as a new-born baby.

My fifth link is His and Hers by Alice Feeney, in which there is another recovering alcoholic. The narrative moves between two characters ‘Him’, Jack Harper and ‘Her’, Anna Andrews. Jack is a Detective Chief Inspector, who has recently moved to Blackdown in Surrey to be in charge of the Major Crime Team there. When a woman is murdered in Blackdown village, both Anna and Jack are suspects.

And my final link is another book set in Surrey. It is The Hog’s Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Croft. Hog’s Back is a ridge in the North Downs in the Surrey countryside. It was first published in 1933 during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the two world wars. It’s an Inspector French murder mystery where first one person then others disappear. Have they been murdered?

My chain has taken me from the USA to the UK and Canada, ending back in the UK. There are three debut novels and all six books are crime fiction novels.

Next month (February 6, 2024), we will start with the book you finished on this month (or the last book read).