Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Readerwhere 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.
The book I’m currently reading is The Black Loch by Peter May, the fourth book in May’s Lewis Trilogy. I’ve read and loved the first three books. So I was keen to read it, and so far (I’ve read 45%) it’s living up to my expectations.
The book begins with a Prologue:
The sun set some time ago. Although it is not yet dark enough, somehow for murder.
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.
Page 56:
‘Did I ever tell you about the whaling boy?’
He never had.
‘You know what a whale is, Finn?’
‘Of course!’
‘Well there was a time when we killed them all over the planet. Hundreds and thousands of them.’
Description from Amazon:
A MURDER
The body of eighteen-year-old TV personality Caitlin is found abandoned on a remote beach at the head of An Loch Dubh – the Black Loch – on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis. A swimmer and canoeist, it is inconceivable that she could have drowned.
A SECRET
Fin Macleod left the island ten years earlier to escape its memories. When he learns that his married son Fionnlagh had been having a clandestine affair with the dead girl and is suspected of her murder, he and Marsaili return to try and clear his name.
A RECKONING
But nothing is as it seems, and the truth of the murder lies in a past that Fin would rather forget, and a tragedy at the cages of a salmon farm on East Loch Roag, where the tense climax of the story finds its resolution.
Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!
This month’s theme is Trick or Treat: books that you feel strongly about, whether positively or negatively.
I don’t like tricks so my books are all books I’ve enjoyed – real treats!
Reginald Hill’s 17th Dalziel and Pascoe novel, set in a Yorkshire village, Dendale. Three little girls had gone missing from the village one summer. Their bodies were never found, and the best suspect, a strange lad named Benny Lightfoot, was held for a time, then released. Fifteen years later another little girl, Lorraine, aged seven went out for a walk one morning with her dog before her parents got up and didn’t return home, reviving memories of the missing children from fifteen years earlier. It was a case that has haunted Dalziel.
This book is tightly plotted with many twists that made me change my mind so many times I gave up trying to work out who the murderer was and just read for the pleasure of reading. Hill’s descriptive writing is rich and full of imagery. The main characters are fully rounded people and the supporting cast are believable personalities, often described with wry humour.
Mirren is looking for a copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, a particular one that had belonged to her Great Aunt Violet. It was a special edition, with hand-drawn plates by Aubrey Beardsley and now Great Aunt Violet, who is in hospital seriously ill would love to see the book for Christmas. I loved that book as a child, so this is what made the story irresistible for me. She went to the book town Hay-on-Wye, bookshops in Edinburgh and a secondhand bookshop in Northumberland that sounds very like Barter Books in Alnwick, my favourite bookshop. She bumps into mysterious, charming Theo, who, unbeknownst to her, is searching for the same book for reasons of his own…
It was a real treat to read Tamburlaine Must Die, a short book of only 140 pages, that I read in a day. Weaving together fact and fiction and set in 1593 this is a tense, dramatic story of the last days of Christopher Marlowe, playwright, poet and spy. Accused of heresy and atheism, his death is a mystery, although conjecture and rumours abound. It has an immediacy, that drew me into the late Elizabethan world.
I loved the spooky, tense atmosphere and as soon as I started reading it knew I was going to enjoy this book. The settings are vividly described, the characters come across as real people, and the plot is amazing, multi- layered, with plenty of suspects for the murder and numerous twists and turns to throw me off the scent. For quite a while you don’t even know the name of the victim, who was found in the woods, called ‘Sally in the Wood’. It’s a police procedural centred on Ellie, a pupil at the private school, where her mother Rachel works as the school counsellor and her father, Ben, a detective sergeant who is on the investigation team
I loved this book. Barbara Kingsolver writes in such a way that I can easily visualise the scenes, beginning with the opening paragraph in which she describes a tractor tire blowing up, flinging a man up in the air and throwing him over the top of a Standard Oil sign. Taylor (originally called Marietta/Missy) grew up in rural Kentucky. She left home when she had saved enough to buy a car, an old VW. She changed her name to Taylor after the first place where she ran out of petrol, which just happened to be Taylorville. She drove on until the car broke down in the middle of nowhere, on land owned by the Cherokee tribe. And it was there at a garage that an Indian woman abandoned a baby girl in Taylor’s car – she called the baby, Turtle.
This the story of Morgan’s voyage on the Titanic, divided into four days as he tells it. It’s mainly about the young rich people as they drink and party their way across the Atlantic. Morgan is part of the crowd but he is not rich, and although he has connections, he’s a young American who has to earn his living. Day four is the day the Titanic sank. I could easily imagine what it was like to be a passenger, people rushing about the boat, trying to get on the lifeboats and being separated from friends and family. And the final scenes bring home the reality that it really was a case of every man for himself with the callous attitude towards the steerage passengers, the lack of lifeboats and the disregard of the ice warnings. And so the boat described as unsinkable, sank.
R is for Raven Black by Ann Cleeves, the first in her Shetland series, crime novels set in the Shetland Islands, to the north of mainland Scotland. This is a murder mystery investigated by Inspector Jimmy Perez.
It begins on New Year’s Eve as Magnus Tait is seeing the new year in on his own, until two teenage girls knock on his door to wish him a Happy New Year. A few days later one of the girls is found dead in the snow not far from Magnus’s house, strangled with her own scarf.
The book has a strong sense of location and a terrific atmosphere – the landscape, the sea, the weather, the circling ravens and the spectacle of Up Helly Aa (the Fire Festival), all anchor the story and bring the book to life.
Upcoming Themes
November 1: Nostalgia
December 6: Giftable – Books you would give or would like to receive as a gift
January 3, 2026: New Books – Ones you have received recently or are looking forward to reading or seeing published this year
It’s almost time for Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. It’s now in it’s sixth year. I took part in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
There are no categories this year, although participants are invited to start the month with a My Year in Novellas retrospective looking at any novellas read since last NovNov, and finish it with a New to My TBR list based on the novellas that others have tempted them with over the course of the month.
There are also two buddy reads this year – Seascraper by Benjamin Wood and Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde.
These are some of the novellas from my TBR shelves:
Women and Writing by Virginia Woolf – 198 pages
Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark – 172 pages
The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald – 167 pages
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner – 184 pages
The Case of the Canterell Codicil by PJ Fitzsimmons – 177 pages
Anty Boisjoly, nineteen-twenty-never Wodehousian gadabout and clubman , takes on his first case when his old Oxford chum and coxswain is facing the gallows, accused of the murder of his wealthy uncle.
Not one but two locked-room murders later, Anty’s pitting his wits and witticisms against a subversive butler, a senile footman, a single-minded detective-inspector, an irascible goat, and the eccentric conventions of the pastoral Sussex countryside to untangle a multi-layered mystery of secret bequests, ancient writs, love triangles, and revenge, and with a twist in the end that you’ll never see coming.
What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next?
I haven’t done a WWW Wednesday post since July! Where has the time gone? We’re now in October and it’s definitely Autumn – colder but stil some bright sunny days. The leaves are now falling, soon our garden will be covered by them – we have a lot of trees.
Currently I’m reading one of Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti novels – Blood from a Stone, which I’m thoroughly enjoying. I’m not surprised by that as I’ve enjoyed all of the Brunetti books I’ve read. He is one of my favourite detectives, maybe even the favourite.
In this one Brunetti is investigating the death of one of the vu cumprà, illegal immigrants selling fake designer handbags from sheets on the ground. He was killed one cold night near Christmas when two men entered Venice’s Campo Santo Stefano and shot him five times. The only witnesses are some American tourists.
I’m also reading Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), which I think is such a strange book, definitely not a children’s book as I had thought. First published in 1726, it’s a satire on human nature and the imaginary travellers’ tale literary subgenre about Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who travels to four strange and distant lands. I’ve nearly finished it and I’ll write more about it in a later post.
The last book I read was West with Giraffes by Linda Rutledge, a novel based on a true story which I loved.
Description from Goodreads
Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave.
It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world’s first female zoo director, a crusty old man with a past, a young female photographer with a secret, and assorted reprobates as spotty as the giraffes.
What will I read next? It could be The Case of the Canterfell CodicilAnty Boisjoly Mysteries Book 1) by P.J. Fitzsimmons, a locked room mystery.
Description from Goodreads
In The Case of the Canterfell Codicil, Wodehousian gadabout and clubman Anty Boisjoly takes on his first case when his old Oxford chum and coxswain is facing the gallows, accused of the murder of his wealthy uncle. Not one but two locked-room mysteries later, Boisjoly’s pitting his wits and witticisms against a subversive butler, a senile footman, a single-minded detective-inspector, an irascible goat, and the eccentric conventions of the pastoral Sussex countryside to untangle a multi-layered mystery of secret bequests, ancient writs, love triangles, revenge, and a teasing twist in the final paragraph.
But when the time comes to start another book it could be something completely different.
Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Readerwhere 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.
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie caught my eye one day as I was browsing the bookshelves in Barter Books in Alnwick, one of my favourite secondhand bookshops. It’s the first of the Flavia de Luce Mystery novels.
The book begins:
It was as black in the closet as old blood. They had shoved me in and locked the door.
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.
Page 56:
Daphne had described to me the effects of tetanus: one scratch from an old auto wheel and I’d be foaming at the mouth, barking like a dog and falling to the ground in convulsions at the sight of water.
Description from Amazon:
England 1950. At Buckshaw, the crumbling country seat of the de Luce family, very-nearly-eleven-year-old Flavia is plotting revenge on her older sisters.
Then a dead bird is left on the doorstep, which has an extraordinary effect on Flavia’s eccentric father, and a body is found in the garden. As the police descend on Buckshaw, Flavia decides to do some investigating of her own.
BooksPlease 