The Friday 56 (With Book Beginnings): The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware + 50/50 Friday

On Friday's I take part in three weekly link ups - The Friday 56, hosted by Freda's Voice, Book Beginnings, hosted by Rose City Reader, and 50/50 Friday is a new weekly link up and it is hosted by Carrie @ The Butterfly Reader and Laura @ Blue Eye Books. For The Friday 56, you choose a book, a book you have just finished, a book you are about to start, your current read, and share a line or a few lines that grab you (but don't spoil anything) from page 56 or 56% of the way through the ebook. Post it and share your post's url on Freda's most recent Friday 56 post. As for Book Beginnings, you share the first sentence or so and your initial thoughts, impressions, or whatever else it inspires, and then link up your post's url with Rose City Reader. Then, for 50/50 Friday, every week there's a new topic featuring two sides of the same coin - you share a book that suits each category and link up on the hosts blogs.

This week I'm spotlighting Ruth Ware's newest mystery The Death of Mrs. Westaway.  I've just started in on it and I'm really excited - I mean, have you seen that description and cover?  I've enjoyed all three of Ruth Ware's previous mysteries, but of those three I'd say The Woman in Cabin 10 has been my favorite.  I'm really intrigued to know if this will surpass that story in my mind.

Beginning:

29th November, 1994

The magpies are back.  It's strange to think how much I used to hate them, when I first came to the house.  I remember coming up the drive in the taxi from the station, seeing them lined up along the garden wall like that, preening their feathers.

56:

And so Hal had picked up her mother's cards, turned on the neon sign outside the booth, and become Madame Margarida in her turn.

The regular clients were easy.  She had watched her mother read time and again for these people, had listened to them spill the details of wayward husbands, tetchy bosses, unhappy children.  And the drunken walk-ins were not too bad - she could bluff her way through those, and besides, they tended to be tourists who would never be back.

No, it was the bookings that worried her.  The people who paid for a full hour's consultation, who rang up beforehand to make sure she would be in.

For those, Hal did something her mother never resorted to.  She cheated.

50/50 Friday: Favorite Book Starting With A/ Z

A - All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill

Z - Zero World by Jason M. Hough