Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

I’m featuring I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh, a book I’m currently reading. It won Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award in 2016, beating J K Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith. I’ve had this book since 2017 and I started to read it then but as it begins with a tragedy I didn’t feel up to reading it and put it back on the shelf for a while. I picked it up again recently when I discovered that Clare Mackintosh, a former police officer, is a member of Crime Cymru, a consortium of Welsh crime writers to promote Welsh crime fiction. And as March is Reading Wales Month I think it’s a good time to read it now.

Book Beginning:

Prologue: The wind flicks wet hair across her face, and she screws up her eyes against the rain. Weather like this makes everyone hurry: scurrying past on slippery pavements with chins buried into collars.

and then Chapter One:

Detective Inspector Ray Stevens stood next to the window and contemplated his office chair, on which an arm had been broken for at least a year.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head if Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 56:

Ray sighed. Puberty had turned his son into a grunting, uncommunicative teenager, and he was dreading the day the same thing happened to his daughter. You weren’t supposed to have favourites, but he had a soft spot for Lucy, who at nine would seek him out for a cuddle and insist on a bedtime story.

Description from Amazon:

A tragic accident. It all happened so quickly. She couldn’t have prevented it. Could she?

In a split second, Jenna Gray’s world descends into a nightmare. Her only hope of moving on is to walk away from everything she knows to start afresh. Desperate to escape, Jenna moves to a remote cottage on the Welsh coast, but she is haunted by her fears, her grief and her memories of a cruel November night that changed her life forever.

Slowly, Jenna begins to glimpse the potential for happiness in her future. But her past is about to catch up with her, and the consequences will be devastating . . .

~~~

What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?