First Chapter ~ First Paragraph (November 24)

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea 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.

My opening this week comes from Dead Centre by Joan Lock which appealed to my love of history and crime fiction.

Blurb

1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.
Trafalgar Square. London.
Unrest has been building for days, the unemployed gathering daily to protest and nightly to sleep.
The police are exhausted by extra duty; blamed for failing to do more to prevent the disorder, they grow increasingly bitter about the protesters’ accusations of brutality.
When a prominent member of one of the new socialist organisations is found dead at the foot of Nelson’s Column, it only adds more fuel to the protesters’ fire.
DI Best and Constable Roberts must juggle competing priorities as they search for the killer and attempt to manage the Trafalgar Square situation.
To make matters worse, Best catches a glimpse of Stark, a man guilty of murder in Whitechapel — the only witness to the crime is Florence Bagnall, Roberts’s fiancé.
As tensions rise and time begins to run out, Best realises that something terrible is about to happen…and that he may be powerless to stop it. NetGalley

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First Chapter ~ First Paragraph ~ Intro

Chapter 1

October, 1887.
How long with this go on? wondered Detective Inspector Ernest Best as he contemplated the extraordinary scene before him.
On the ground all across Trafalgar Square lay hundreds of sleeping people: men, women and children. Some were alone more were huddled together for warmth. The October nights were becoming sharper now.
The luckier ones, or those who had got there early enough, or were more sensible, had found refuge in the lee of the sunken square’s eastern parapet or the western walls of the fountain basins which sheltered them a little from the chill north-east wind.

Please note that these excerpts are taken from a proof copy

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