Friday Focus: The Friday 56 & Book Beginnings

 

It's Friday . . . time to share book excerpts with:

• Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, where bloggers share the first sentence or more of a current read, as well as initial thoughts about the sentence(s), impressions of the book, or anything else that the opening inspires.  
• The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice, where 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.

Today I'm featuring a recent blog tour read, Little Bookshop of Murder, the first book in the Beach Reads cozy mystery series by Maggie Blackburn  The excerpts shared are from the eBook I received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Beginning:  Summer Merriweather slipped off her flip-flops, allowing the sand's warmth to comfort the bottom of her feet like it had thousands of times before.  She looked out over the waves, the water shimmering in the soft pink morning light.  She walked toward the water and gazed over the horizon--the line between the sky and sea barely visible.  A seagull cried in the distance.

 

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56% of eBook:  As they turned down the path, a rushing movement from one of the seagrass-covered dunes startled Summer.  She jumped.

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My thoughts:  This brand-new cozy mystery series is well-suited to read as summer winds down. Set on Brigid's Island off the coast of North Carolina, it boasts a bookshop on the boardwalk, steps from the beach, and the descriptive opening lines take me back to my own memories of previous beach visits.

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From Goodreads:  A Shakespearean scholar inherits a beachside bookshop--and a murder mystery--in this delightful new cozy series for fans of Kate Carlisle and Ellery Adams.

Summer Merriweather's career as a Shakespeare professor hangs by a bookbinder's thread. Academic life at her Virginia university is a viper's pit, so Summer spends her summer in England, researching a scholarly paper that, with any luck, will finally get her published, impress the Dean, and save her job. But her English idyll ends when her mother, Hildy, shuffles off her mortal coil from an apparent heart attack.

Returning to Brigid's Island, NC, for the funeral, Summer is impatient to settle the estate, sell her mom's embarrassingly romance-themed bookstore, Beach Reads, and go home. But as she drops by Beach Reads, Summer finds threatening notes addressed to Hildy: "Sell the bookstore or die."

Clearly, something is rotten on Brigid's Island. What method is behind the madness? Was Hildy murdered? The police insist there's not enough evidence to launch a murder investigation. Instead, Summer and her Aunt Agatha screw their courage to the sticking place and start sleuthing, with the help of Hildy's beloved book club. But there are more suspects on Brigid's Island than are dreamt of in the Bard's darkest philosophizing. And if Summer can't find the villain, the town will be littered with a Shakespearean tragedy's worth of corpses--including her own.

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This Friday Focus: The Friday 56 & Book Beginnings post was originally composed and/or compiled and published by Catherine for the blog, bookclublibrarian.com.  It cannot be republished without attribution.