Happy Friday! Today I am participating in First Line Friday, hosted by Reading is My Superpower, AND First Lines Friday, created by Wandering Words!
First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?
- Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
- Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
- Finally… reveal the book!
“The scream sneaked into a gap between a barful of shouted intimate conversations and the Kreeshan Blue cover band.”
Anyone have any guesses on what book this is? I’ll give you a few clues…
any guesses yet? no? okay, one more gif…
Last chance to guess!
Today’s book is…
Nightwatch on the Hinterlands by K. Eason Series: The Weep #1
Published on October 19, 2021 by Daw Books
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Futuristic, Mystery, Science Fiction, Thriller
Pages: 416
Add to Goodreads
Author Links: Website, Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram
Set in the universe of Rory Thorne, this new standalone sci-fi mystery follows an unlikely duo who must discover the motive behind an unusual murder.
THE TEMPLAR: When Lieutenant Iari hears screams in the night, she expects to interrupt a robbery or break up a fight. Instead she discovers a murder with an impossible suspect: a riev, one of the battle-mecha decommissioned after the end of the last conflict, repurposed for manual labor. Riev don't kill people. And yet, clearly, one has. Iari sets out to find it.
THE SPY: Officially, Gaer is an ambassador from the vakari. Unofficially, he's also a spy, sending information back to his government, unfiltered by diplomatic channels. Unlike Iari, Gaer isn't so sure the riev's behavior is just a malfunction, since the riev were created using an unstable mixture of alchemy and arithmancy.
As Gaer and Iari search for the truth, they discover that the murderous riev is just a weapon in the hands of a wielder with wider ambitions than homicide--including releasing horrors not seen since the war, that make a rampaging riev seem insignificant...
About K. Eason
K. Eason started telling tales in her early childhood. After earning two degrees in English literature, she decided to stop writing about everyone elses stories and get back to writing her own. Now she teaches first-year college students about the zombie apocalypse, Aristotelian ethics, and Beowulf (not all at once). She lives in Southern California with her husband and two black cats, and she powers everything with coffee.
“The scream sneaked into a gap between a barful of shouted intimate conversations and the Kreeshan Blue cover band.”
The Thorne Chronicles by K. Eason are some of my favorite (audio) books, and I’m finally listening to the companion novel, Nightwatch on the Hinterlands! This one is the first book in a duology called The Weep, and it takes place quite a while after the previous series ends. It’s really interesting seeing the ripple effects of the choices characters made so far in the future! I’m loving this so far, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys SFF!
What have you been reading lately? Let me know in the comments and have a splendiferous day!
Do you participate in either of these memes? Let me know if you do and link your posts in the comments so I can visit! And don’t forget to have a splendiferous week!
My first line comes from All That It Takes by Nicole Deese:
As the door to our new life swung open and my ten-year-old son rushed across the threshold to explore the second-story apartment, the you-break-it- you-buy-it policy flashed across my mind like a hazard warning.
I don’t read much fantasy and this one sounds intense. Very opposite is my first line, from Of Time and Circumstance by Ann Elizabeth Fryer: https://daniellegrandinetti.com/2022/04/01/of-time-and-circumstance/