Friday Focus: The Friday 56 & Book Beginnings #68

It's Friday . . . time to share excerpts from a current or upcoming read with:

• Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, where bloggers share the first sentence or more of a current read, as well as initial thoughts about the sentence(s), impressions of the book, or anything else that the opening inspires.  
• The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an ebook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Today I'm featuring The Distance by Helen Giltrow, a debut thriller that I borrowed from the library.  It's the start of a new series.  

 

 

 

Beginning:  (Prologue)  Day 25:  Saturday

Karla

There's blood in my hair.  Twelve hours and I've still got blood in my hair.

 

(Part 1) Day 1: Wednesday-Day 2: Thursday

Karla

I've always known the past might hunt me down--despite all my precautions, the false trails and the forged histories and everything else I've done to distance myself from it.

 

But not like this.

 

******************** 
Page 56:  "He has a choice now: follow, or wait.  Or even run, though running only does you any good if you have somewhere to run to."

*********************   

My thoughts: I love a good thriller, and the narrator intrigues me with the mention of a mysterious past.

 

 

Which book are you reading now or about to start?
 

Friday Focus: The Friday 56 & Book Beginnings #68 was originally published by Catherine for bookclublibrarian.com. This post cannot be republished without attribution.    

 

Waiting on Wednesday: The Distance

 

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly feature of the Breaking the Spine blog.  It's a great way to share information about forthcoming books with other readers.  Since I enjoy the thriller genre, today I'm featuring a debut in this category that recently came across my radar screen and will be available soon. 

 

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 

Publication Date:  September 9, 2014

From barnesandnoble.com: A dark, ultra-contemporary, and relentlessly paced debut thriller about a London society woman trying to put her secret criminal past behind her, and the hit man who comes to her with an impossible job she can't refuse. 

Charlotte Alton is an elegant socialite. But behind the locked doors of her sleek, high-security apartment in London's Docklands, she becomes Karla. Karla's business is information. Specifically, making it disappear. She's the unseen figure who, for a commanding price, will cover a criminal's tracks. A perfectionist, she's only made one slip in her career—several years ago she revealed her face to a man named Simon Johanssen, an ex-special forces sniper turned killer-for-hire. After a mob hit went horrifically wrong, Johanssen needed to disappear, and Karla helped him. He became a regular client, and then, one day, she stepped out of the shadows for reasons unclear to even herself. Now, after a long absence, Johanssen has resurfaced with a job, and he needs Karla's help again. The job is to take out an inmate—a woman—inside an experimental prison colony. But there's no record the target ever existed. That's not the only problem: the criminal boss from whom Johanssen has been hiding is incarcerated there. That doesn't stop him. It's Karla's job to get him out alive, and to do that she must uncover the truth. Who is this woman? Who wants her dead? Is the job a trap for Johanssen or for her? But every door she opens is a false one, and she's getting desperate to protect a man—a killer—to whom she's inexplicably drawn. 

Written in stylish, sophisticated prose, The Distance is a tense and satisfying debut in which every character, both criminal and law-abiding, wears two faces, and everyone is playing a double game.

About the author:  HELEN GILTROW is a former bookseller and freelance editor whose writing has been shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award and the Daily Telegraph's Novel in a Year Competition in the United Kingdom. She lives in Oxford, England. This is her first novel.

Which book are you waiting for?

Waiting on Wednesday: The Distance was originally published by Catherine for bookclublibrarian.com.  This post cannot be republished without attribution.