My Friday Post: The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths

Published on December 18, 2020 by Margaret18 Comments

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.

At the moment I’m reading The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths, the 11th book in the Dr Ruth Galloway mystery series. One of the reasons I’m enjoying it is because it has links to the 1st book in the series, The Crossing Places, and another is that I’m fascinated by standing stones and in particular by stone circles.

It begins:

12 February 2016
DCI Nelson,
Well, here we are again. Truly our end is our beginning. That corpse you buried in your garden, has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? You must have wondered whether I, too, was buried deep in the earth. Oh ye of little faith. You must have known that I would rise again.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice. *Grab a book, any book. *Turn to Page 56 or 56% on your ereader . If you have to improvise, that is okay. *Find a snippet, short and sweet, but no spoilers!

These are the rules:

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Page 56:

Clough’s face gives nothing away. He hands over a Starbuck’s cup, which probably completely violates the karma of the dig, and looks around the trench with apparent interest. Ruth drinks the coffee gratefully.

~~~

Description:

DCI Nelson has been receiving threatening letters telling him to ‘go to the stone circle and rescue the innocent who is buried there’. He is shaken, not only because children are very much on his mind, with Michelle’s baby due to be born, but because although the letters are anonymous, they are somehow familiar. They read like the letters that first drew him into the case of The Crossing Places, and to Ruth. But the author of those letters is dead. Or are they?

Meanwhile Ruth is working on a dig in the Saltmarsh – another henge, known by the archaeologists as the stone circle – trying not to think about the baby. Then bones are found on the site, and identified as those of Margaret Lacey, a twelve-year-old girl who disappeared thirty years ago.

As the Margaret Lacey case progresses, more and more aspects of it begin to hark back to that first case of The Crossing Places, and to Scarlett Henderson, the girl Nelson couldn’t save. The past is reaching out for Ruth and Nelson, and its grip is deadly.

My Friday Post: The Big Sleep

Published on December 11, 2020 by Margaret14 Comments

The Big Sleep begins:

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

These are the rules:

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Page 56:

I smiled. He didn’t like the smile. His eyes got nasty.

Blurb:

Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood’s two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA’s seedy backstreets, Marlowe’s got his work cut out – and that’s before he stumbles over the first corpse . . .

~~~

I’ve just started to read this book, a crime fiction classic, the first in Chandler’s Philip Marlow series set in Los Angeles. In the introduction Ian Rankin writes that it opens with his favourite opening paragraph in all crime fiction and that it is

a story of sex, drugs, blackmail and high society narrated by a cynical tough guy, Philip Marlowe‘ and that it is ‘such fun to read that you won’t notice how clever its author is being.

My Friday Post: Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses by Georges Simenon

Published on October 30, 2020 by Margaret4 Comments

Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses is one of the novellas I included in my Novellas in November post. It has 172 pages and is Simenon’s 53rd Inspector Maigret book, first published in 1959.

It begins:

‘You haven’t forgotten your umbrella, have you?’
‘No.’
The door was about to shut, and Maigret was already turning towards the stairs.
‘You’d better wear your scarf.’
His wife ran to get it unaware that this little remark would leave him out of sorts for some time, melancholy thoughts churning through his brain.

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Page 56:

My job is to look for the truth, and that is what I’m doing. Your presence in fact would incline me not to look very far, because it’s very unusual for the relatives of a murder victim to send for a lawyer before they can even be questioned by the police.

Blurb:

When the head of a powerful Parisian family business is murdered in his bed, Maigret must pick apart the family’s darkest secrets to reveal the truth.

“The curious thing was that there seemed to be no grief here, only a strange dejection, a kind of uneasy stupor…”

Maigret is called to the home of the high-profile Lachaume family where the eldest brother has been found shot dead. But on his arrival, the family closes ranks and claims to have heard and seen nothing at the time of the murder. Maigret must pick his way through the family’s web of lies, secrets, and deceit, as well as handle Angelot, a troublesome new breed of magistrate who has waded into the case. And it’s the estranged black sheep of the family, Veronique, who may hold the key to it all with her knowledge of the depths to which the family will sink to protect their reputation.

My Friday Post: Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter

Published on October 23, 2020 by Margaret16 Comments

As I’ve nearly finished reading Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year I’ve been wondering what to read next. I had thought I might read Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch, which is the second Rivers of London book. But this morning I picked up The Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter and began reading and just carried on. It’s the first Morse book in which Morse and Lewis first met and worked together. Morse thought they would get on well together.

It begins:

‘Let’s just wait a bit longer please,’ said the girl in dark-blue trousers and the light summer coat. ‘I’m sure there’s one due soon.’

This is a scene at a bus stop where two girls are waiting for the next bus to Woodstock. One of the girls doesn’t want to wait, wanting to hitch a lift and they both left the bus stop – it was the wrong decision.

These are the rules:

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

She pointed to a large volume, also lying open on the carpet in front of the TV set. ‘Mary’s started to read it.’ Morse picked it up and looked at the title. Who was Jack the Ripper?
‘Mm.’
‘I’m sure you’ve read that.’
Morse’s moral began to sag again. ‘I don’t think I’ve read that particular account, no.’ (page 56)

Blurb:

The death of Sylvia Kaye figured dramatically in Thursday afternoon’s edition of the Oxford Mail. By Friday evening Inspector Morse had informed the nation that the police were looking for a dangerous man – facing charges of wilful murder, sexual assault and rape.

But as the obvious leads fade into twilight and darkness, Morse becomes more and more convinced that passion holds the key . . .

My Friday Post: A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

Published on October 16, 2020 by Margaret9 Comments

Today my book beginning is from A Journal of the Plague Year: being observations or memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665 by Daniel Defoe, one of my TBRs. Now would seem to be the right time to read it.

It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that l, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither they say it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among goods which were brought home by their Turkish fleet; others said it was brought from Canada; others from Cyprus.

These are the rules:

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

On page 56 Defoe is describing the work of the undersexton – the grave digger and bearer of the dead – in the parish of St Stephen, Coleman, who went out along the many alleys and thoroughfares to fetch the bodies a very long way:

Here they went with a kind of hand-barrow and laid dead bodies on it, and carried them to the carts; which work he performed and never had the distemper [the plague] at all, but lived about twenty years after it, and was sexton of the parish to the time of his death. His wife at the same time was a nurse to infected people, and tended many who died in the parish, being for her honesty recommended by the parish officers; yet she was never infected either.

Defoe went on to describe how the sexton and his wife protected themselves against the infection. He held garlic and rue in his mouth and smoked tobacco. His wife’s remedy was to wash her head in vinegar and she sprinkled her head-clothes with vinegar – if the smell was particularly offensive she snuffed vinegar up her nose and held a handkerchief wetted with vinegar to her mouth.

Blurb:

In 1665 the plague swept through London, claiming over 97,000 lives. Daniel Defoe was just five at the time of the plague, but he later called on his own memories, as well as his writing experience, to create this vivid chronicle of the epidemic and its victims. ‘A Journal’ (1722) follows Defoe’s fictional narrator as he traces the devastating progress of the plague through the streets of London. Here we see a city transformed: some of its streets suspiciously empty, some – with crosses on their doors – overwhelmingly full of the sounds and smells of human suffering. And every living citizen he meets has a horrifying story that demands to be heard.

My Friday Post: Deadland by William Shaw

Published on October 9, 2020 by Margaret8 Comments

Today my book beginning is from Deadland by William Shaw, one of the latest books I’ve bought.

The first time they tried stealing a phone, it went arse-tit. The second time was worse.

These are the rules:

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Stark and white against the grey sky, the gallery made Cupidi think of a cathedral built by missionaries.
Margate had once been a grand place, an elegant curve of Georgian houses facing a bay with sand the colour of honey. The town had been sliding downhill for decades.

About the book:

YOU CAN RUN

The two boys never fitted in. Seventeen, the worst age, nothing to do but smoke weed; at least they have each other. The day they speed off on a moped with a stolen mobile, they’re ready to celebrate their luck at last. Until their victim comes looking for what’s his – and ready to kill for it.

YOU CAN HIDE

On the other side of Kent’s wealth divide, DS Alexandra Cupidi faces the strangest murder investigation of her career. A severed limb, hidden inside a modern sculpture in Margate’s Turner Contemporary. No one takes it seriously – not even the artwork’s owners, celebrity dealers who act like they’re above the law.

YOU CAN DIE

But as Cupidi’s case becomes ever more sinister, as she wrangles with police politics and personal dilemmas, she can’t help worrying about those runaway boys. Seventeen, the same age as her own headstrong daughter. Alone, on the marshes, they’re pawns in someone else’s game. Two worlds are about to collide.

Kent and its social divisions are brilliantly captured in Deadland, a crime thriller that’s as ingeniously unguessable as it is moving and powerful.

~~~

This is the second book in the DS Alexandra Cupidi series. I’ve read the first Salt Lane, which I thoroughly enjoyed, so I’m hoping this one is just as good.