Blogmas Day 11 First Lines Friday Christmas Edition

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

Lines

Addison Greyborne heaved her hip against the front door of Beyond the
Page, her book and curio shop, to open it, and skittered through. As it began
to close back on her, she clasped the box in her arms tighter to her chest and
zigzagged around the wooden edge of the door. A wind gust slammed it
shut behind her. She exhaled a sigh of relief—disaster avoided.
Or was it?
Another gust of wind kicked up a mini-cyclone of snow. It danced across
her face, blinding her, sucking at her breath. She staggered forward and
gasped. The air, heavy with the scent of wood smoke, caught in the back of
her throat—a reminder of the well-stoked fireplaces residents of Greyborne
Harbor used in their latest arsenal to ward off the bone-chilling cold of the
past weeks. When the mini–snow twister passed, she glanced down at her
cherished cargo still fully intact and smiled weakly.
Was it her imagination or did the briny tang of the wind gusts off the
ocean seem warmer this morning than they’d had in weeks? She glanced at
the sky. If the rays of sunshine peeking through the low-hanging clouds
were any indication that the storm had finally changed course, just maybe
the Fire and Ice Festival planned for the upcoming weekend would be a
success after all.

Goodreads Blurb:

In Lauren Elliott’s fifth Beyond the Page Bookstore Mystery, a murder and a missing first edition of The Secret Garden have rare bookstore owner Addie Greyborne running around her Massachusetts town trying to read the clues…

January isn’t the season for the seaside, but the big Fire and Ice festival is keeping bookstore owner Addie busy. Amid the plans for a fireworks display and an ice-carving competition, she’s also dog sitting for a friend in the hospital. When Addie goes to her friend’s house to gather supplies, she notices an interesting item on the nightstand which belongs to her shop assistant, Paige: a very valuable copy of the beloved children’s book The Secret Garden.

But Addie’s blood runs cold when she finds something else: a dead body behind the bakery next door to her shop. Martha, the bakery owner, has no alibi–and has been seen in a heated argument with the victim. And the next thing Addie knows, that first edition has gone missing. Is there a connection between the body and the treasured tome? If there is, it’s up to Addie to find a killer with a motive as hidden as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s famous garden..

In Lauren Elliott’s fifth Beyond the Page Bookstore Mystery, a murder and a missing first edition of The Secret Garden have rare bookstore owner Addie Greyborne running around her Massachusetts town trying to read the clues…

January isn’t the season for the seaside, but the big Fire and Ice festival is keeping bookstore owner Addie busy. Amid the plans for a fireworks display and an ice-carving competition, she’s also dog sitting for a friend in the hospital. When Addie goes to her friend’s house to gather supplies, she notices an interesting item on the nightstand which belongs to her shop assistant, Paige: a very valuable copy of the beloved children’s book The Secret Garden.

But Addie’s blood runs cold when she finds something else: a dead body behind the bakery next door to her shop. Martha, the bakery owner, has no alibi–and has been seen in a heated argument with the victim. And the next thing Addie knows, that first edition has gone missing. Is there a connection between the body and the treasured tome? If there is, it’s up to Addie to find a killer with a motive as hidden as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s famous garden..

I chose to showcase book because it’s not only a book about books and a 2020 release but a holiday read with a dash of mystery.

Alex