First Chapter ~ First Paragraph (June 26)

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 I’m sharing the opening paragraph of Sisters of Mercy by Caroline Overington. I’ve recently read this book, but due to a severe backlog of reviews to write it’ll be a little while until it is posted on Cleopatra Loves Books.

Blurb

A haunting crime novel story of two sisters – one has vanished, the other is behind bars…

Snow Delaney was born a generation and a world away from her sister, Agnes.

Until recently, neither even knew of the other’s existence. They came together only for the reading of their father’s will – when Snow discovered, to her horror, that she was not the sole beneficiary of his large estate.

Now Snow is in prison and Agnes is missing, disappeared in the eerie red dust that blanketed Sydney from dawn on September 23, 2009.

With no other family left, Snow turns to crime journalist Jack Fawcett, protesting her innocence in a series of defiant letters from prison. Has she been unfairly judged? Or will Jack’s own research reveal a story even more shocking than the one Snow wants to tell?

With Sisters of Mercy Caroline Overington once again proves she is one of the most exciting new novelists of recent years.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

First Chapter ~ First Paragraph ~ Intro

Chapter One

I’ll be honest and say I got a bit of a shock when I started getting letters from Snow Delaney.
The first of them arrived in April 2011, by which time she was already in prison.
Apparently Snow decided to write to me after her lawyer – or, more accurately, her old lawyer, the one she’s now sacked – gave her copies of some of the articles I’d written about her case.
They must have got up her nose, those articles, because Snow accused me in that first letter of getting ‘key facts’ wrong and being biased against her.
I wrote back, asking her to tell me where I’d gone wrong, and then Snow replied, and so on and so forth for more than a year.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I bought my copy of Sisters of Mercy on the basis of an excellent spotlight post by that very knowledgeable blogger Margot Kinberg of Confessions of a Mystery Novelist… and I strongly suggest that you read her post if you want to know more. At this point I’ll just say her recommendation was, as always, spot on!

What do you think? Would you keep reading? Perhaps you’ve already read this, what did you think?