Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Vicky from I’d Rather Be At The Beach who posts the opening paragraph (sometime two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening. Feel free to grab the banner and play along.
This week my choice of opening comes from Murder Mile by Lynda La Plante which is the fourth in the series of books that takes us back to Jane Tennison’s life in the 1970s, that is before Prime Suspect.
Blurb
February, 1979, ‘The Winter of Discontent’. Economic chaos has led to widespread strikes across Britain.
Jane Tennison, now a Detective Sergeant, has been posted to Peckham CID, one of London’s toughest areas. As the rubbish on the streets begins to pile up, so does the murder count: two bodies in as many days.
There are no suspects and the manner of death is different in each case. The only link between the two victims is the location of the bodies, found within a short distance of each other near Rye Lane in Peckham. Three days later another murder occurs in the same area. Press headlines scream that a serial killer is loose on ‘Murder Mile’ and that police incompetence is hampering the investigation.
Jane is under immense pressure to catch the killer before they strike again.Working long hours with little sleep, what she uncovers leaves her doubting her own mind. Amazon
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First Chapter ~ First Paragraph ~ Intro
CHAPTER ONE
Jane Tennison, recently promoted to sergeant, looked out of the passenger window of the CID car at the snow which was falling too lightly to settle. It was 4.30 on a freezing Saturday morning in mid-February 1979 and recently the overnight temperatures had been sub-zero. The weather reports were calling it one of the coldest winters of the century.
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Now I’ll grant you that isn’t the most exciting of opening paragraphs but I think that there are some authors who can write about the most mundane of subjects, and us British are famed for our endless conversations about the weather after all, and yet somehow I feel I’m going to be put under the author’s spell. Although coming relatively (ok, really) late to her writing, I thoroughly enjoyed the writing style in Good Friday, the second in the series and I love the 1970s setting.
Well what do you think, would you keep reading?
