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 The Singing Sands, by Josephine Tey, an Inspector Grant mystery, one of the books I’m currently reading.

It was six o’clock of a March morning, and still dark. The long train came sidling through the scattered lights of the yard, clicking gently over the points.

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 is 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.

I’ve seen the lighthouse on the point there standing up in the air. Yes. halfway up in the sky. I’ve seen the hill there change shape until it looked like a great mushroom. And as for those rocks by the sea, those great pillars of stone, they can turn light and transparent and move about as if they were walking through a set of the Lancers.

Description:

En route for the Outer Hebrides on sick leave, Inspector Grant literally stumbles upon the body of a young man in a train compartment that reeks of whisky. Grant firmly walks away from the corpse, determined to let nothing interfere with his holiday plans.
But he absentmindedly carries a newspaper away from the scene with him, a newspaper with a cryptic poem scribbled in the margin: The beasts that talk, The streams that stand, The stones that walk The singing sand . . . That guard the way To Paradise.
The memory of the unknown dead man’s face and the strange verse drive Grant into investigating, even though the police are content to call it an accidental death. What are the beasts that talk? Who wrote it? When? It isn’t long before Inspector Grant finds that his holiday is becoming more and more a busman’s holiday. Trail leads to trail: some blind alleys, some red hot. Who was the passenger in compartment B Seven? Was his death accidental or was it murder?

Josephine Tey was a pseudonym for Elizabeth Mackintosh(1896 – 1952). She was a Scottish author who wrote mainly mystery novels. I’ve read four of her books before and enjoyed them, especially The Daughter of Time, a mix of historical research and detective work. Inspector Alan Grant is in hospital and to keep his mind occupied he decides to discover whether Richard III really did murder his nephews – the Princes in the Tower.

This one is looking good, so far. What do you think? Are you tempted to read it? If you have read it would you recommend it? Do let me know.