First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?
- Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
- Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
- Finally… reveal the book!
Got it? Okay let’s go! Here is the quote…
“In Sandy Lake, Minnesota, they would remember that summer first by the storm, then the lingering devastation, and later, the murders.”
Do you know this one?
I think that is a pretty good first line!
This is the fourth book in a really good murder mystery series
Have you guessed?
Yes? No?
Give up?
Here it is!
Beneath a Broken Sky
Summary from Goodreads:
Detective Ben Packard has put down roots in the small town of Sandy Lake. A difficult thing to do; it’s a hot, miserable summer, and a tornado has swept through causing irreparable damage. Trees are felled, homes destroyed, and people are desperate. Worse, the storm has also blown in a group of storm chasers with something to hide.
Then a woman is killed in her home. The mother of a gay boy and unpopular among the locals for the hell she recently raised at school when the administration refused to punish a group of students who were bullying her son, there’s almost too many suspects to count.
But to Packard, the case hits close to home. And when someone from his past shows up on his doorstep out of the blue, he realizes he’ll have to confront the reality of navigating life as a gay man in a small town bent on tradition, no matter the cost.
The heat suffocates. The violence simmers. Before the summer is out, someone else will die.
I just picked this up from the library and I am really excited to start it when I am done with my current read. I have loved this series since the first book, And There He Kept Her. I was thinking after the third book that the series would be over, but I am so glad it isn’t. This sounds like the perfect summer read.
What do you think? Have you read this series? Is it on your TBR? Let me know in the comments.
Until next time…
Confessions of a Serial Reader 
I think it sounds like a good read. 🙂 I do like a good first line, I will give up on a book if it has a bad first line. Which is probably wrong of me, I’ve read a few great books out there which have terrible first chapters, so you never know. Perhaps I ought to start with the second chapter. 😉
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