Teaser Tuesdays: Third Girl

This week my teaser lines come from the book I just finished, Third Girl by Agatha Christie -- one of the later books in the Hercule Poirot series. In this snippet, someone has just stumbled upon a dead body, always a hazard of any Christie novel. The quote comes from page 213, late in the story, but not really a spoiler:

What she was looking at had a nightmarish quality. On the floor lay a handsome young man, his arms flung wide, his chestnut hair falling on his shoulders. He wore a crimson velvet coat, and his white shirt was dappled with blood.... She was aware with a start that there was a second figure with her in the room.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or take part yourself, just head on over to her blog.

And please feel free to leave me a link to your Teaser Tuesday post in your comment here.

Teaser Tuesdays: Mr. Murder

This week my teaser lines come from Mr. Murder by Dean Koontz. This snippet comes from page 227, and I haven't actually read this far in the novel, so I'm not really sure exactly what's going on here. But I should probably include a little warning that it's not for the faint of heart.

He drifts toward healing sleep, confident of waking with full health and vigor in several hours.... A few feet from him, in the trunk of the car, lies the dead man who once owned the Buick -- cold, stiff, and without any appealing prospects of his own.... How good it is to be special, to be needed, to have a destiny.

As a matter of fact, the book itself is definitely not for the squeamish. Which just might mean ME.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or take part yourself, just head on over to her blog.

And please feel free to leave me a link to your Teaser Tuesday post in your comment here.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Much better week, last week -- where reading is concerned, anyway. Now if the weather would just keep improving, the fall would be shaping up quite nicely.

• Finished last week
  I actually managed to finish four books last week:
  Mrs. Malory and A Time to Die, by Hazel Holt; The Killings at Badger's Drift, by Caroline Graham; and The Man in Lower Ten, and Episode of the Wandering Knife, both by Mary Roberts Rinehart.
  
  
  
  This past week, I also realized that I've completed quite a few of the reading challenges I signed up for this year. So now I need to get lots of reviews written and start working on my wrap-up posts.
  
  
• Reading this week
  I'm still plugging away at my last Early Reviewer book from Library Thing -- Literary Brooklyn by Evan Hughes. It's taking me an amazingly long time to get through it, which is probably not a good sign. I've also started Third Girl by Agatha Christie, and Mr. Murder by Dean Koontz, and I've got a really strong suspicion that the Hughes book may have to wait until those two are finished.
  
  
  
  
• Up next
  Still have plenty of unread ARCs to choose from (shame on me!), and I've yet to read anything for the Battle of the Prizes Challenge (British version), so I'm keeping that in mind.
  

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. If you want to let the world know what books you're going to be reading this week, head on over to her blog and leave your link. It's also a great way to discover new books and new blogs.

Booking Through Thursday: The Sequel

This week, BTT asks: "If you could get a sequel for any book, what would it be?"

Tough question. Right away, I thought: Don't like sequels -- books or movies. But then I thought about all those series books I read, and they do sort of qualify as sequels. So I guess I don't dislike them so much after all.

Can't think of any book I'd like to see sequel-ized, though. If it's a book I loved, with interesting characters and a thrilling plot, I wouldn't want to chance spoiling it with a follow-up that doesn't measure up. And if it's a book I had to struggle through, why would I ask for more?

Teaser Tuesdays: The Man in Lower Ten

This week my teaser lines come from The Man in Lower Ten, a vintage mystery (published in 1906) by Mary Roberts Rinehart. I just finished the book last night, and don't know why it's taken me so many weeks to get through it because I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I read this one on my iPad, so I'm not sure about page numbers, but this snippet is from Chapter VII. And it has the protagonist ruminating about his precarious situation as the chief suspect in a murder that occurred on the train he was traveling in -- just before the train was involved in a deadly crash.

Have you ever seen a fly, who, in these hygienic days, finding no cobwebs to entangle him, is caught in a sheet of fly paper, finds himself more and more mired, and is finally quiet with the sticky stillness of despair?...Well, I was the fly.

Well, I've never been a murder suspect, but that description of the fly is pretty much the way I felt at the dentist's office last week.



Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or take part yourself, just head on over to her blog.

And please feel free to leave me a link to your Teaser Tuesday post in your comment here.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Well, even though October is already ten days old, this is my first Monday reading list for the month. My reading life has been a little scattered lately -- actually, it's been a wreck. But I won't get into that right now. I have every intention of getting back on track this week, so here goes.

• Recently finished:
  Quiet as a Nun, by Antonia Fraser. First book in her Jemima Shore mystery series. I've read a couple of the later books but never managed to read this first novel until now. I enjoyed this one, although (like most of the Jemima tales), it was a little slow-moving.
  
  
  That's it, I'm afraid; haven't finished anything else. But I have abandoned a few books, including Graham Swift's Last Orders -- just couldn't get into it for some reason, although it seemed well-written and a lot of people have recommended it. But life is just too short, you know?
  
  
• Reading this week:
  Still reading Literary Brooklyn by Evan Hughes -- must finish that up and get a review posted over at Library Thing.
  
  
  Also hoping to finish up two that I've been reading for weeks now -- The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart,
  
  
  and Hazel Holt's Mrs. Malory and A Time to Die. Both of those are short and light -- should be able to get through them pretty quickly if I can just stay awake long enough!
  
  
  
• Next up:
  Haven't the foggiest. Probably another mystery, though. I don't seem to be able to stick with anything but whodunits these days. But I've got a must-read list that stretches from here to Alpha Centauri and back, so there's always something there to tempt me.
  

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. If you want to let the world know what books you're going to be reading this week, head on over to her blog and leave your link. It's also a great way to discover new books and new blogs.

Teaser Tuesdays: The Cabinet of Curiosities

I haven't really been doing much reading (or blogging) this week -- had some dental work last week and I've been in a sort of Vicodin haze for several days now. But I'm hoping that's all behind me, at least enough for me to get a little reading done. This teaser is from a book I haven't started yet, but one I'm thinking of reading for the RIP/VI Challenge -- Cabinet of Curiosities by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. In this snippet, Nora Kelly has just asked a stranger to leave her office in the New York Museum of Natural History:

But the man didn't leave....She turned. He had extended his hand. Nestled within it was a small, brown skull. (p.17)

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or take part yourself, just head on over to her blog.

And please feel free to leave me a link to your Teaser Tuesday post in your comment here.