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 current read, Back to the Garden by Laurie R. King. The excerpts shared are from a hardcover edition borrowed from the library.

 

Beginning:  Prologue

Then -- Southern Oregon

The man in the dripping Army poncho paused to shove back his hood and stand, head cocked, trying to make out the half-heard sound. A minute later, a car came into view, half a mile or so down the hill--a big white Pontiac, struggling to keep on the road. The man leaned on his shovel, judging the contest between the treacherous surface--the way up to the commune was unpaved, rutted, steep, and slick with the endless rain--and the determined car, which obviously had good tires.

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Page 56:  "They have archives, I'm seeing what might be there."

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My thoughts: A commune? Archives? These settings piqued my interest enough to start reading and the author is appealing to me as well. I've enjoyed a few of her other stand-alone novels. So far, I'm enjoying the mystery unfolding in this story about a wealthy family, an inheritance, and the discovery of human remains on their property.

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From GoodReads:  A fifty-year-old cold case involving California royalty comes back to life--with potentially fatal consequences--in this gripping standalone novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series.

A magnificent house, vast formal gardens, a golden family that shaped California, and a colorful past filled with now-famous artists: the Gardener Estate was a twentieth-century Eden.

And now, just as the Estate is preparing to move into a new future, restoration work on some of its art digs up a grim relic of the home's past: a human skull, hidden away for decades.

Inspector Raquel Laing has her work cut out for her. Fifty years ago, the Estate's young heir, Rob Gardener, turned his palatial home into a counterculture commune of peace, love, and equality. But that was also a time when serial killers preyed on innocents--monsters like The Highwayman, whose case has just surged back into the public eye.

Could the skull belong to one of his victims?

To Raquel--a woman who knows all about colorful pasts--the bones clearly seem linked to The Highwayman. But as she dives into the Estate's archives to look for signs of his presence, what she unearths begins to take on a dark reality all of its own.

Everything she finds keeps bringing her back to Rob Gardener himself. While he might be a gray-haired recluse now, back then he was a troubled young Vietnam vet whose girlfriend vanished after a midsummer festival at the Estate.

But a lot of people seem to have disappeared from the Gardener Estate that summer when the commune mysteriously fell apart: a young woman, her child, and Rob's brother, Fort.

The pressure is on, and Raquel needs to solve this case--before The Highwayman slips away, or another Gardener vanishes.

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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.