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, Crime in Cornwall, the second book in the British Book Tour Mysteries series by Emma Dakin. The excerpts shared are from the eBook I received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

 

  

Beginning:  CHAPTER ONE

The walls were shaking again. The noise level from the neighbor's back garden rose like the roar of a football crowd and had reached that stage of raucous shouts mixed with wild music that made sleep impossible. I'd tried ear plugs. I'd tried putting my head under the blankets. I gave up.

 

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Page 56:  I loved the way the centuries had melded in the architecture with Tudor houses overhanging the street beside 1960s flat-faced, square apartment buildings.  Jumbled together it all worked as a lively and tolerant overgrown village.

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My thoughts:  Tour company owner Claire Barclay is about to lead a trip to Cornwall to explore the settings used in several classic mystery series. But when bestselling thriller writer Oliver Nott is found murdered in her neighbor's garden, Claire's carefully planned itinerary expands to include an investigation of the murder. It seems that Nott's untimely demise occurred shortly before the anticipated release of his latest novel, which is set in Cornwall. Is it possible that the book's setting is somehow related to Nott's death? 

Installments in this delightful cozy series weave together a celebration of classic fictional murders and a murder to be solved as part of the current tour. Of notable appeal is the armchair travel to various places in the English countryside as well as  the homage to mystery series set in Great Britain.

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Synopsis:  Patrick and Rita Stonning, Claire’s neighbors in Ashton-on-Tinch, dash down from London on weekends to host loud parties. They work in a publishing house and use their Ashton semi-detached home as a break from big city stress. Patrick arrives at Claire’s door distraught, reporting one of his partygoers, Oliver Nott a best-selling author, dead. Claire discovers that not only is he dead, he’s been murdered. Patrick is suspected of the murder and has enough motive to satisfy the police. Nott wrote mysteries set in Cornwall and had planned to take his lucrative contracts to a competing company. His latest book dealt with smuggling in the caves of Cornwall. The police, including DI Mark Evans from the newly formed Major investigations Team wonder if he learned too much from his research. Claire takes her six tourists, most from America, to the Cornwall coast in search of sites of mystery novels and hears the opinions of the Cornish people on smuggling. She asks Patrick to meet her in Penzance to give a guest lecture on the smuggling in Oliver Nott’s novels. Claire finds Patrick self-aggrandizing and arrogant but doesn’t agree he would murder and sets out to find the one responsible.

 

 

 

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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.