Tomb of the Golden Bird by Elizabeth Peters

Tomb of the Golden Bird
(Amelia Peabody #18)
by Elizabeth Peters

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

“Ramses!”

Seated on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel, I watched with interest as a tall young man stopped and turned, as if in response to the calling of his name. Yet this was not the fourteenth century B.C., but the year of our Lord 1922; and the tall man was no ancient pharaoh. Though his bronzed skin and black hair resembled those of an Egyptian, his height and bearing proclaimed him for what he was–an English gentleman of the finest quality. He was also my son, “Ramses” Walter Peabody Emerson, who was better known in Egypt by his sobriquet.

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jenn of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can participate. If you’re new to Teaser Tuesdays, the details are at Jenn’s A Daily Rhythm or on my Tuesday Memes Page.

“Yes, I suppose so,” Howard said flatly. “I–to tell you the truth, Mrs. Emerson, I am so worn down with suspense and excitement, I am incapable of thinking.”

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Have you read any of this series or her other books?

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

 

 

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jenn of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can participate. If you’re new to Teaser Tuesdays, the details are at Jenn’s A Daily Rhythm or on my Tuesday Memes Page.

 

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary – and terribly elegant.

Well, having said that, I admit it: I’m not a clairvoyant.

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

 

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Manuela, my only friend, comes for tea with me in my lodge. Manuela is a simple woman and twenty years wasted stalking dust in other people’s homes has in no way robbed her of her elegance. Besides, stalking dust is a very euphemistic way to put it. But where the rich are concerned, things are rarely called by their true name.

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The Elegance of the Hedgehog
(L’elegance du herisson)
by Muriel Barbery

What are you currently reading? Do you have anything to share with us?

Title: Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly

Those Who Hunt the Night
(James Asher #1)
by Barbara Hambly

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

“Lydia?”

But even before the shadows of the stairwell swallowed the last echoes of his wife’s name, James Asher knew something was desperately wrong.

The house was silent, but it was not empty.

He stopped dead in the darkened front hall, listening. No sound came down the shadowy curve of the stairs from above.

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jenn of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can participate. If you’re new to Teaser Tuesdays, the details are at Jenn’s A Daily Rhythm or on my Tuesday Memes Page.

They paused at the foot of the steps, Asher lifting the lamp nearly to the low ceiling beams to illuminate the cellar around them. Its glare smudged the dusty boards of a nearly empty coalbin in light and caught the fraying edges of translucent curtains of cobweb, thick with dust.

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Human James Asher is coerced by Simon Ysidro, a several hundred year old vampire, into investigating the murders of vampires in London. Set in the early 1900s, it features the old timey vampires as opposed to the new breed so often written about today. It’s quite refreshing.

This is a reread. I first read Those Who Hunt the Night over twenty years ago, anxiously awaited a sequel and finally forgot about it until reminded by the recent publications in the series. I am finding the reread as fascinating as the original reading and already have the second book lined up in the TBR pile.
Hambly’s James Asher series:
1. Those Who Hunt the Night (1988, published as Immortal Blood in the UK)
2. Traveling with the Dead (1995)
3. Blood Maidens (2010)
4. The Magistrates of Hell (2012)
5. The Kindred of Darkness (2013)
6. Darkness on His Bones (2015)

Visit Barbara Hambly’s website for more information on this and her other series.

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Are you reading anything exciting this week?

Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris

Dead Ever After
(Sookie Stackhouse #13)
by Charlaine Harris

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

The morning after I raised my boss from the dead, I got up to find him sitting half-dressed in my backyard on my chaise lounge. It was about ten a.m. on a July day, and the sun was bathing the backyard in brilliant heat. Sam’s hair was turned into a bright tangle of red and gold. He opened his eyes as I came down the back steps and crossed the yard. I was still in my nightshirt, and I didn’t even want to think about my own hair. It was pretty much one big snarl.

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jenn of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can participate. If you’re new to Teaser Tuesdays, the details are at Jenn’s A Daily Rhythm or on my Tuesday Memes Page.

After he had drifted back into the woods and I had locked the house up tight, I sat in front of my computer. I had planned to check my e-mail, but instead I found myself trying to unravel Bill’s meaning.

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This is the last Sookie novel, wrapping up the series. I am curious as to what will happen and how it will all end. I’ve heard many readers mention that they didn’t like the way the series ended.

What are you reading now? Do you have anything to share with us?

Roadkill by Kinky Friedman

Roadkill
(Kinky Friedman #10)
by Kinky Friedman

This isn’t the cover of the edition I have (drat the luck),

but I couldn’t resist using the cover featuring Willie.

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

You could say the whole adventure began the day I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw the gypsy. That explanation might not hold up in a court of law, but as far as I’m concerned it’s close enough for country dancing. I’d come in rather late the night before and as I slept I was visited by a strange and singularly vivid dream. Without going into graphic details, let me just say that I finally came across the girl in the peach-colored dress who was being held captive by a remote tribe deep in the jungles of Borneo. By disguising myself as a middle-aged orangutan, I was at last able to secure her release but not, however, before they took two Frisbees and used them to make her lips big.

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jenn of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can participate. If you’re new to Teaser Tuesdays, the details are at Jenn’s A Daily Rhythm or on my Tuesday Memes Page.

After a promising little string of successfully solved cases, for some unknown reason clients now seemed to be staying away in droves. Not only was my professional life moving along with all the fluid grace of a midtown traffic jam, but my personal life had slowed to a virtual standstill as well.

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Cover blurb:

Who would slap an Indian curse on a good ol’ boy like country singer Willie Nelson? Probably the same person who’s been firing shots into Willie’s hotel room and sending nasty notes promising the cowboy crooner a one-way ticket to the big rodeo in the sky. Could it have something to do with the medicine man who got run over by Willie’s tour bus one dark night? If anyone can find out, it’s ace troubleshooter and well-known troublemaker Kinky Friedman–on the road again in his tenth wickedly funny, off-the-wall mystery caper.

Warning: The character doesn’t even pretend to be politically correct. In fact, he appears to revel in not being so. That being said, I find these books hilariously biting and humorous.

Do you enjoy books with plenty of humor? What are you reading now?

Graveyard Dust by Barbara Hambly

Graveyard Dust
(Benjamin January #3)
by Barbara Hambly

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

African drums in darkness sullen as tar.

Rossini’s “Di tanti palpit” unspooling like golden ribbon from the ballroom’s open windows.

Church bells and thunder.

Benjamin January flexed his aching sholders and thought, Rain coming. Leaning on the corner of Colonel Pritchard’s ostentatious house, he could smell the sharp scent in the hot weight of the night, hear the shift in the feverish tempo of the crickets and the frogs. The dim orange glow of an oil lamp fell through the servants’ door beside him, tipping the weeds beyond the edge of the yard with fire.

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jenn of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can participate. If you’re new to Teaser Tuesdays, the details are at Jenn’s A Daily Rhythm or on my Tuesday Memes Page.

Given the trouble his curiosity had caused him in the past, January reflected that he should know better. In any case, he had a good idea of what he would find in the darkness where the trees got thick.

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Barbara Hambly definitely has a way with words. She also seems to write in multiple genres. This series, historical mysteries, is set in 1830s New Orleans. The first book I remember reading by her is Ishmael, a Star Trek novel featuring Spock (my favorite!). I read it in the 1980s, so I have been reading Hambly’s books for three decades. The award-winning author has also written in the science fiction, fantasy and supernatural genres.

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Do you enjoy reading series? What are some of your favorites?

Wyllard’s Weird by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Wyllard’s Weird
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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

There are some travellers who think when they cross the Tamar, over that fairy bridge of Brunel’s, hung aloft between the blue of the river and the blue of the sky, that they have left England behind them on the eastern shore–that they have entered a new country, almost a new world. This land of quiet woods and lonely valleys, and bold brown hills, barren, solitary–these wild commons and large moorlands of Cornwall seem to stand apart, as they did in the days gone by, when this province was verily a kingdom, complete in itself, and owning no sovereignty but its own.

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jenn of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can participate. If you’re new to Teaser Tuesdays, the details are at Jenn’s A Daily Rhythm or on my Tuesday Memes Page.

At this point, said the report, the child again became hysterical, and had to be carried away. After this she had an attack of brain-fever, and could not again be interrogated formally.

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This book has taken over my life! Wyllard’s Weird is a 19th Century three-volume sensation novel which Cheryl found at the Internet Archives. Thanks, Cheryl! She also discovered that another meaning of weird refers to a person’s destiny. I am proofing reading it for Free Literature and it will be available at Project Gutenberg in numerous formats. This means I can’t just fly through the reading for fear of missing too many OCR errors. But it became very exciting and intriguing to me about halfway through the first volume and it is hard to keep making myself slow down.

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What are you currently reading? Do you have anything to share with us?

Deep Pockets by Linda Barnes

Deep Pockets
(Carlotta Carlyle #10)
by Linda Barnes

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

I hate running errands. I put them off and put them off, and then one morning the cat’s got no food, there are zero stamps on the roll, and I realize I own no underwear minus holes. I understand some people like to shop for clothes, do it for pure pleasure and entertainment, but I count it as one more damned errand. When the tasks mount up and I can’t put it off any longer, I make a list and set forth to Harvard Square. There are less pricey areas, granted, but the Square has its own post office and lies within spitting distance of my house.

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jenn of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can participate. If you’re new to Teaser Tuesdays, the details are at Jenn’s A Daily Rhythm or on my Tuesday Memes Page.

I first noticed him as I was waiting, along with thirty-five other assorted students, panhandlers, and shoppers, for the scramble light at the intersection of Brattle and Mass Ave. His gaze lingered a moment too long and I wondered briefly whether I’d met him at a party or exchanged small talk with the man at a bar.

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I read this series a number of years ago and then moved and forgot about it. Have you read anything by Linda Barnes? What are you reading now?

A Royal Pain by Rhys Bowen

A Royal Pain
(Royal Spyness #2)
by Rhys Bowen

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

The alarm clock woke me this morning at the ungodly hour of eight. One of my nanny’s favorite sayings was “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” My father did both and look what happened to him. He died, penniless, at forty-nine.

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jenn of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can participate. If you’re new to Teaser Tuesdays, the details are at Jenn’s A Daily Rhythm or on my Tuesday Memes Page.

“Come on in, ducks,” she said, almost hauling me inside. “I’ll tell you where your granddad is.”

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What are you currently reading? Do you have anything to share with us?

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

U is for Undertow
(Kinsey Millhone #21)
by Sue Grafton

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

What fascinates me about life is that now and then the past rises up and declares itself. Afterward, the sequence of events seems inevitable, but only because cause and effect have been aligned in advance. It’s like a pattern of dominoes arranged upright on a tabletop. With the flick of your finger, the first tile topples into the second, which in turn tips into the third, setting in motion a tumbling that goes on and on, each tile knocking over its neighbor until all of them fall down. Sometimes the impetus is pure chance, though I discount the notion of accidents. Fate stitches together elements that seem unrelated on the surface. It’s only when the truth emerges you see how the bones are joined and everything connects.

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jenn of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can participate. If you’re new to Teaser Tuesdays, the details are at Jenn’s A Daily Rhythm or on my Tuesday Memes Page.

His hesitation was one of those nearly imperceptible blips that indicates internal editing. “My parents are gone.”

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What are you reading now? Do you have anything to share?