Book Beginning: Flesh and Blood by Patricia Cornwell

The Friday 56: *Grab a book, any book. *Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader  *Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. *Post it. *Add your (url) post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also, Book Beginnings at Rose City Reader.

Book beginning:

June 12, 2014 Cambridge, Massachusetts 

Copper flashes like shards of aventurine glass on top of the old brick wall behind our house. I envision ancient pastel stucco workshops with red tile roofs along the Rio dei Vetrai canal, and fiery furnaces and blowpipes as maestros shape molten glass on marvers. Careful not to spill, I carry two espressos sweetened with agave nectar.

page 56: 

"There's no room in a homicide investigation for personal problems."

Publisher:
FLESH AND BLOOD ( November 11, 2014, William Morrow)
 It’s Dr. Kay Scarpetta’s birthday, and she’s about to head to Miami for a vacation with Benton Wesley, her FBI profiler husband, when she notices seven pennies on a wall behind their Cambridge house. Is this a kids’ game? If so, why are all of the coins dated 1981 and so shiny they could be newly minted?

Her cellphone rings, and Detective Pete Marino tells her there’s been a homicide five minutes away. A high school music teacher has been shot with uncanny precision as he unloaded groceries from his car. No one has heard or seen a thing.

In this 22nd Scarpetta novel, the master forensic sleuth finds herself in pursuit of a serial sniper who leaves no incriminating evidence except fragments of copper. The shots seem impossible, yet they are so perfect they cause instant death. The victims appear to have had nothing in common, and there is no pattern to indicate where the killer will strike next.

First New Jersey, then Massachusetts, and then the murky depths off the coast of South Florida, where Scarpetta investigates a shipwreck, looking for answers that only she can discover and analyze. And it is there that she comes face to face with shocking evidence that implicates her techno genius niece, Lucy, Scarpetta’s own flesh and blood.

Sunday Salon: A Post Without Pictures

Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also visit It's Monday: What Are You Reading hosted by Book Journey.

I'm engrossed in reading The Visitors by Sally Beauman, a novel set in 19th century Egypt about the discovery of the tomb of the boy-king Tutankhamun. I am also reading a library find, Blood Rubies by Jane Cleland, an antiques mystery.

Book tours are coming up next week for Fog Island Mountains set in typhoon-prone northern Japan, and for Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz, a novel about the infamous archenemy of Sherlock Holmes.

Thanks to the publishers for the following review ARCs and books - fiction and nonfiction:

Hush Hush: A Tess Monaghan Book by Laura Lippman - private detective Tess Monaghan, introduced in the classic Baltimore Blues, in an absorbing mystery that plunges the new parent into a disturbing case involving murder and a manipulative mother.

Flesh and Blood: Kay Scarpetta #22 by Patricia Cornwall -  high-stakes series starring Kay Scarpetta—a complex tale involving a serial sniper who strikes chillingly close to the forensic sleuth herself.

Driving the King, a novel by Ravi Howard - A daring  new novel that explores race and class in 1950s America, witnessed through the experiences of Nat King Cole and his driver, Nat Weary

A Bowl of Olives: On Food and Memory by Sara Midda - From the author of the international bestseller In and Out of the Garden and the wondrous sketchbook Sara Midda’s South of France comes a long-awaited treasure of a book. Drawn from the artist’s wealth of impressions and memories, it is a book for lovers of food and art and fine gift books—a book for anyone who, upon arriving in a new town, seeks first the local market, or who believes the best thing to do on a given night is to share a table with friends. 

Russian Tattoo: A Memoir by Elena Gorokhova - An exquisite portrait of mothers and daughters that reaches from Cold War Russia to modern-day New Jersey, from the author of A Mountain of Crumbs—the memoir that “leaves you wanting more” (The Daily Telegraph, UK).

What books are new on your desk?