Friday Focus: The Friday 56 and 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, Once Upon a Seaside Murder by Maggie Blackburn. The excerpts shared are from an eBook copy I received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

 

 

 

Beginning:  Even though Hildy Merriweather's heart was pagan, she loved Christmas.

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56% of eBook:  Her cousin was talking crazy. She was making wide jumps in logic. What was the possibility of something like this being true?

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My thoughts:  When a cozy mystery author who participated in a panel hosted by Beach Reads vanishes without a trace, Summer is compelled to find her. Is Mimi Sinclair's disappearance linked to the novel she wrote about a decades-old unsolved local murder? As strange events continue to unfold, Summer races to solve the mystery before further calamity befalls her and the Brigid's Island community.

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From GoodReads:  As the holidays approach, bookstore owner Summer Merriweather learns a dark secret in this second volume of Maggie Blackburn's Beach Reads mystery series.

There's no place like home for the holidays, even if home is sleepy, beachside Brigid's Island, NC. During this season for giving, the town wakes up to a welcome throng of shoppers--and Beach Reads is no exception. But bookseller Summer Merriweather's Christmas cheer turns to cringing fear when she uncovers a deadly secret about her late mother--a secret someone will kill to keep.

When the local library hosts a cozy mystery panel discussion, Summer learns that one of the authors on the panel based her book on an actual murder that shook Brigid's Island thirty-five years before. Worse, she soon learns that her dearly missed mother, Hildy, took a disturbingly deep interest in the case, going so far as to collect clippings and keep a journal of the dark doings. This doesn't jibe with Summer's memories of her usually cheery mother at all.

Tidings get worse when Summer learns of her long-lost biological family's involvement in the crime...and still worse when the life of the book's author is threatened. With the help of Hildy's plucky book club, Summer puts her scholarly smarts to work on protecting the cozy author and solving the decades-old murder.

But this ghost from Christmas past may still be deadly in the present, and if she can't find the killer, Summer's future will be brief.

 

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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. 

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