Longshot - Book Beginnings on Friday and The Friday 56

It's been a long time since I read a book by Dick Francis, but when I saw Longshot on a "free books" shelf, I grabbed it. What a fun story! This book was published in 1990, but it holds up well -- even though characters have car phones instead of cell phones. Mr. Francis passed away in 2010 but his 40+ books are still entertaining.

Genre: Mystery
Book Length: 322 Pages (paperback)
Amazon Link: Longshot
Amazon Author Page: Dick Francis

Book Beginning:
     I accepted a commission that had been turned down by four other writers, but I was hungry at the time.
     Although starving in a garret had seemed a feasible enough plan a year earlier, the present realities of existence under the frozen eaves of a friend's aunt's house in a snowy January were such that without enough income to keep well fed and warm I was a knockover for a risky decision.
     My state of course was my own fault.

The Friday 56 (from Page 56 in my paperback):
In the now sunlit kitchen Tremayne was standing by the table, talking crossly into the telephone.
"You would have thought that someone would have noticed by now that they're missing a horse."

Synopsis (from Amazon):
"Fast-paced, meticulously plotted...Nobody sets up a mystery better than Dick Francis."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Travel writer John Kendall didn't think he was doing anything too out of the ordinary when he tramped off to rural England for an interview with a successful race horse trainer. Soon enough, however, Kendall realizes that completing the book will be tricky at best. In fact, the perils described in his survival manuals pale next to the dangers in rural England....
Selected by the Literary Guild, the Mystery Guild, and Doubleday Book Club
                

Anyone can participate in Book Beginnings on Friday and The Friday 56.
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The Shadow Cartel (The Dominic Gray Series) - Teaser Tuesday and First Chapter / First Paragraph

    I enjoy reading books that are set in places I've visited or towns where I've lived. So when I saw that The Shadow Cartel was set in Miami, where I lived for many years, I knew I had to read it, even though the story is outside my usual genre. 
    I've just started reading the book, and I'm enthralled by the story! The author obviously knows the city inside and out. He even mentioned the neighborhood where my husband and I once lived. From the venerable Tobacco Road bar to the high rise office buildings along Brickell Avenue, I'm enjoying my virtual visit back to South Florida. 
   The Shadow Cartel is Book #4 in the Dominic Gray Series.



First Paragraph:
Peoples Temple Agricultural Project,
Northwest Guyana
November 18, 1978
     The man known as John Wolverton cocked his head at the sound, a faint thwap that echoed through the vines and trees. He reasoned the shot had come from a poacher's rifle.
     Surely it hadn't come from the Port Kaituma airstrip. From Congressman Ryan's delegation, sent to investigate the conditions of Reverand Jones's utopian cult that had set up shop in the middle of the Guyanese jungle. Reverend Jones was a sociopath, but he wasn't suicidal, and the doctors agreed the two were mutually exclusive.


Teaser (from 21% on my Kindle):
[Here's a character's description of Miami from her memories. Yes, it's only two sentences.]
   She could still draw a map of the Fairchild Botanical Gardens, picture the evening light sinking into No Name Harbor, and tell friends visiting the city where to find the best ceviche, the most authentic sangria, the perfect little wine shop hidden in the maze of Cuban bakeries on Coral Way. She loved the smell of roasting coffee, the sexy fashion boutiques, the day trips to the Everglades and the weekend trips to the Keys, the serendipity of a peacock sighting on the way to the grocery store, the delight of biting into one of the mangoes weighing down the limbs of neighborhood trees in summer.

Genre: Thriller
Book Length: 434 Pages
Amazon Link: The Shadow Cartel
Author Website: Layton Green

Synopsis:

The sins of the past always return...

    The General.  A name whispered in hushed tones among the criminal underworld, from Miami to Buenos Aires.  A name even the drug cartels fear.  

    Yet the General is a man without a face.  There are no fingerprints on file, no known base of operations, not even a biographical sketch.  He operates in the shadows, but somehow controls a vast criminal empire.

    And he has never made a direct incursion onto U.S. soil -- until now.

    In Miami, disgraced DEA agent Fred Hernandez is called to investigate a bizarre crime scene, where the bodies of four drug dealers are sprawled around an iron cauldron.  Even stranger is the mysterious 'blue lady' that a drug-addled witness claims killed the men.

    Lana Valenciano, an ambitious CIA operative, informs Agent Hernandez that the murders might be connected to a legendary South American criminal known as the General.  Lana claims the General has become a threat to national security -- but has no idea how to find him.

    The government's best hope?  Private investigators Dominic Grey and Viktor Radek, who might be the only people alive with the skills to unravel the General's tangled web.  

    Thrown together on a covert manhunt, Grey and the two agents delve into the darkest reaches of international drug trafficking, only to unearth a sinister chapter in the history of the CIA that has spilled into the present -- and put them in the crosshairs of an underworld puppeteer with a frightening reach.

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Jenn of Books and A Beat. Post two sentences from somewhere in a book you're reading. No spoilers, please!

Link at Books and A Beat

First Chapter/First Paragraph/Tuesday Intros is hosted by Bibliophile By The Sea. To participate, share the first paragraph (or a few) from a book you're reading or thinking about reading soon.

Link at BibliophileByTheSea

Twitter: @SandyNachlinger

Facebook: sandy.nachlinger

Skinny Dip - Teaser Tuesday and First Paragraph / First Chapter

     I lived in South Florida for many years, and during that time, I discovered Carl Hiaasen through his columns in The Miami Herald. It wasn't long before I became a fan and started collecting his novels. Hiaasen's stories involve bizarre characters, crazy plots, sex, murder, and corruption and have an environmental twist. (Warning: R-rated.) 
     Kirkus Reviews says Skinny Dip is "bitingly satirical, sublimely zany, and deeply satisfying." I agree!

First Paragraph(s): 
     At the stroke of eleven on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perronne went overboard from a luxury deck of the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess. Plunging toward the dark Atlantic, Joey was too dumbfounded to panic.
     I married an asshole, she thought, knifing headfirst into the waves.
     The impact tore off her silk skirt, blouse, panties, wristwatch and sandals, but Joey remained conscious and alert. Of course she did. She had been co-captain of her college swim team, a biographical nugget her husband obviously had forgotten.
     Bobbing in its fizzy wake, Joey watched the gaily lit Sun Duchess continue steaming away at twenty nautical miles per hour. Evidently only one of the other 2,049 passengers was aware of what had happened, and he wasn't telling anybody. 

Teaser from Page 204 (hardback copy):
     "All you wanted," the man said, "was a hot girl on your arm, Chazzie. A girl your buddies would notice and talk about--the female equivalent of a new Rolex. You weren't getting married, you were accessorizing."

Genre: Mystery / Satire
Book Length: 355 Pages (hardback)
Amazon Link: Skinny Dip
Author's Website: Carl Hiaasen

Synopsis (from Amazon):
     Chaz Perrone might be the only marine scientist in the world who doesn’t know which way the Gulf Stream runs. He might also be the only one who went into biology just to make a killing, and now he’s found a way–doctoring water samples so that a ruthless agribusiness tycoon can continue illegally dumping fertilizer into the endangered Everglades. When Chaz suspects that his wife, Joey, has figured out his scam, he pushes her overboard from a cruise liner into the night-dark Atlantic. Unfortunately for Chaz, his wife doesn’t die in the fall.
     Clinging blindly to a bale of Jamaican pot, Joey Perrone is plucked from the ocean by former cop and current loner Mick Stranahan. Instead of rushing to the police and reporting her husband’s crime, Joey decides to stay dead and (with Mick’s help) screw with Chaz until he screws himself.
     As Joey haunts and taunts her homicidal husband, as Chaz’s cold-blooded cohorts in pollution grow uneasy about his ineptitude and increasingly erratic behavior, as Mick Stranahan discovers that six failed marriages and years of island solitude haven’t killed the reckless romantic in him, we’re taken on a hilarious, full-throttle, pure Hiaasen ride through the warped politics and mayhem of the human environment, and the human heart.

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Miz B of A Daily Rhythm. Post two sentences from somewhere in a book you're reading. No spoilers, please!

Link at ADailyRhythm.com

First Chapter/First Paragraph/Tuesday Intros is hosted by Bibliophile By The Sea. To participate, share the first paragraph (or a few) from a book you're reading or thinking about reading soon.

Link at BibliophileByTheSea

An Unholy Alliance - First Chapter/First Paragraph and Teaser Tuesday

  

      When I discovered that An Unholy Alliance takes place in Oregon's wine country - an area I've visited more than once - I wanted to read it. And when I learned that the main character is in her fifties, I was sold! So many of the book's settings were familiar to me, described beautifully by author Judy Nedry. The mystery kept me turning pages (well... clicking on my Kindle), and the well-developed characters (who have problems of their own) kept me interested in the plot's outcome. It was fun to learn more about vineyards and the wine-making industry too.
      An Unholy Alliance is the first book in the Emma Golden Mysteries series. The second book The Difficult Sister takes two fifty-something women on a road trip down the Oregon coast. I can't wait to read that one too!

First Paragraph:
Prologue
Friday Night
He waited in the half light a little drunk, a little floaty, but with that constant edge of irritation that had grown so much worse in the past couple years that he couldn't remember when he'd last been rid of it. Surely only during sleep, which was troubled now on the best of nights.

Teaser (from 59% on my Kindle):
For alcohol, we are told, is a subtle foe - all good times and laughter until the day it quits working and fun is no longer part of the equation. It is replaced by terror and self-loathing so great that only a drink or a drug will quiet the screaming in your brain. On that day you learn that one drink is too many and a thousand are not enough.

Genre: Mystery
Length: 336 Pages
Amazon Link: An Unholy Alliance
Author Website: Judy Nedry

Synopsis from Goodreads:
     Like many women in their fifties, Emma Golden feels invisible. She lives quietly in her Portland, Oregon bungalow and minds her own business. But her tranquil life is about to change. She is asked to return to the rolling hills of her former wine country home south of the city to supervise a friend's bed and breakfast inn near Dundee. Emma arrives at the Westerly Inn during grape harvest. She is under contract to write a book about Oregon wineries, and it's business as usual until she discovers one of her subjects dead in a wine vat-murdered at his own dinner party.
     Cougar Crossing Winery owner Ted Maxell was a ruthless and dishonest newcomer to the northern Willamette Valley wine scene. Many people wanted him gone-including his son, many local winegrowers, and even Emma's ex-husband, Dwight. Then Maxell's daughter, Tiffany, calls Emma and begs for assistance. "I know who killed my father," she wails. When Emma answers Tiffany's cry for help, she finds herself drawn into the search for a murderer or murderers with secrets worth killing for.

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Miz B of A Daily Rhythm. Post two sentences from somewhere in a book you're reading. No spoilers, please!
Link at ADailyRhythm.com

First Chapter/First Paragraph/Tuesday Intros is hosted by Bibliophile By The Sea. To participate, share the first paragraph (or a few) from a book you're reading or thinking about reading soon.

Link at BibliophileByTheSea

Christmas Cracker - Book Beginnings on Friday and The Friday 56

     Outspoken private investigator Morgan "Morg" Mahoney and drop-dead-gorgeous heiress Heather Pierce are unlikely friends, and that's part of what makes Christmas Cracker so much fun. Morg's habit of putting her foot in her mouth adds humor to the plot, and when the two women take a trip from California to an English manor house, you know it isn't going to be dull. A series of murders and a kidnapping will keep you turning pages until the bad guy is revealed.  
     R. L. Cherry has recently released It's Bad Business, a second Morg Mahoney mystery. I'm looking forward to reading it too.

Book Beginning:
Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy - 2002
Chapter 1
     Exercising is a pain in the ass. Any woman who says she likes it is crazy, lying, masochistic or some combination of the three. I do it, work out that is, but I hate it. I could claim that I exercise to keep in shape in case I ever have to kick some bad guy's butt. After all, it does take more than just putting "Private Investigator" on the door to be good at my job. And since private investigators are normally men, a woman in the field needs every edge she can get.

The Friday 56 (from 56% on my Kindle):
"If my life were threatened, I wouldn't pay one copper penny. Andrew, though, is my son. I cannot chance letting him die...."

Genre: Mystery / Women Sleuths
Length: 312 Pages
Amazon Link: Christmas Cracker
More About This Author: R. L. Cherry Website

Synopsis:
While private investigator Morgana (Morg) Mahoney leaves sunny Southern California to celebrate Christmas in a picturesque English manor house, she finds she cannot escape crime. What begins as a vacation soon becomes a murder mystery laced with threads of local history, race horses, the IRA, family secrets, and, of course, pure greed. In the land of Sherlock Holmes, Morg finds herself using some of the same methods as that first consulting detective to solve the case.
                         

Anyone can participate in Book Beginnings on Friday and The Friday 56.
Click HERE to connect to other Book Beginnings posts (sponsored by Rose City Reader)
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Remix - Book Beginnings and Friday 56

I enjoyed escaping to London through the pages of REMIX. The heroine of this story (Caz) restores rocking horses for a living; the hero (Ric) is a rock star in a band named The Voices in My Head. Who could imagine those two together? The author kept me wondering if Ric was scamming Caz or if he really was innocent of the murder everyone seemed to think he'd committed. He seems to be telling the truth, but ... with the drugs and drinking in his earlier years, maybe he actually did kill his friend. Or has he really changed while he's been in hiding?

Book Beginning:
I didn't see the man straight away.
The sun was shining, so I'd taken my breakfast toast and coffee out on the terrace. I strolled to the far corner to admire a view I never tire of: a London roofscape, a glimpse of trees in Hoxton Square two streets away, and the distant Gherkin gleaming in the early morning sun.

The Friday 56 (from 56% on my Kindle):
Ric wore jeans and a white shirt, with most of the buttons undone, and I could hardly take my eyes off him. This was nothing new. Sometimes, when he was out, I'd secretly go to YouTube and watch videos of The Voices performing, so I could stare at him as much as I liked without him noticing and teasing me.

Synopsis (from Goodreads):
Ric Kealey is the charismatic lead singer of uber-successful band, The Voices in my Head - and he died three years ago. Caz Tallis restores rocking horses in her London studio. When Ric turns up, shabby and alive, on Caz's roof terrace, she is reluctantly drawn into investigating the murder that led him to fake his own death. A feel good page turner; contemporary fiction with elements of murder mystery and romance, and a satisfying ending.

Just for fun, I'm including the book's trailer too:



Genre:  Contemporary Romance/Mystery
Length: 273 Pages
Amazon Link: Remix
Author Website:  Lexi Revellian

                                                   ********

Anyone can participate in Book Beginnings on Friday and 

The Friday 56. 

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Millstone - Teaser Tuesday

"I hope you find this bastard. I mean, who'd kill a kid?" That's dialogue from the fisherman who found six-year-old Emily Chatburn's body on the shores of Lake Union. His heart-breaking discovery starts an investigation by Seattle Police Detectives Nick Winston and Pat Strom in this second Winston/Strom novel.

No, the murder of a child is not a pleasant subject, but author Kelly Marshall handles the story with compassion. Although some parts of the book are gritty, she balances that with sexy scenes and flashes of wry humor. Marshall  kept me guessing "whodunit" until the very end. 

In today's TEASER, Emily Chatburn's father makes a startling accusation: "She's killed another one. And I'm not letting her get away with it." (At 14% on my Kindle.)

Genre: Murder Mystery
Length: 289 Pages
Amazon Link: Millstone
Website: Kelly Marshall Books

Blurb from Amazon:
Seattle homicide detectives Nick Winston and his female partner Pat Strom have seen it all, but there’s one call every cop hates to get—a child’s murder. When the child’s father bursts into the sanctuary and accuses his estranged wife Elizabeth of killing their daughter, the man is arrested by the detectives. But the case against Cole Chatburn is stymied when a babysitter offers him an alibi for the night.

Disclaimer: Kelly Marshall is a member of my writing group, and I helped edit MILLSTONE.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn't give too much away -- you don't want to ruin the book for others)
• Share the title and author too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers
• Leave a comment on MizB's Teaser Tuesday post (HERE) and include your link so everyone can find your post.

Teaser Tuesday - The Husband's Secret

Infidelity, murder, revenge ... this book has it all and Tupperware too! Set in Australia, the author creates characters who remind me of people I've known (or could easily have known) who are all too real in their failings. The story fascinated me, and I couldn't stop reading. I'll be looking for more books by Liane Moriarty.

Here's my Teaser:

What did it say? She considered tearing it open right that second, before she had time to think about it, like the way she sometimes (not very often) shoved the last piece of chocolate in her mouth, before her conscience had time to catch up with her greed. 
- At 5% on my Kindle

Genre: Contemporary Women's Fiction
Length: 394 Pages
Amazon Link: The Husband's Secret

Synopsis from Goodreads:

My Darling Cecilia
If you're reading this, then I've died . . .

Imagine your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret - something so terrible it would destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others too. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive.

Cecilia Fitzpatrick achieved it all - she's an incredibly successful business woman, a pillar of her small community and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia - or each other - but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband's devastating secret.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read

• Open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here's the link to join in: Teaser Tuesday