BLOGWORDS – Friday 31 May 2019 – FIRST LINE FRIDAY – THE ABC MURDERS by AGATHA CHRISTIE

 

FIRST LINE FRIDAY – THE ABC MURDERS by AGATHA CHRISTIE

 

Welcome to First Line Fridays, hosted by Hoarding Books!!!

 

Tell us your first line in the comments & then head over to Hoarding Books to see who else is participating!

 

 

THE BLURB

There’s a serial killer on the loose, bent on working his way through the alphabet. There seems little chance of the murderer being caught — until her makes the crucial and vain mistake of challenging Hercule Poirot to frustrate his plans …

 

THE AUTHOR

Agatha Christie was born in 1890 and created the detective Hercule Poirot in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). She achieved wide popularity with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and produced a total of eighty novels and short-story collections over six decades.

THE FIRST LINE

It was June of 1935 that I came home from my ranch in South America for a stay of about six months.

 

MY THOUGHTS

Like most of Dame Christie’s stories that I’ve read, it was so long ago I don’t remember much about it—except how much I liked it!

 

 

#Blogwords, First Line Friday, #FLF, The ABC Murders, Agatha Christie

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BLOGWORDS – Friday 24 May 2019 – FIRST LINE FRIDAY – MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS by AGATHA CHRISTIE

 

FIRST LINE FRIDAY – MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS by AGATHA CHRISTIE

 

Welcome to First Line Fridays, hosted by Hoarding Books!!!

Tell us your first line in the comments & then head over to Hoarding Books to see who else is participating!

 

 

THE BLURB

“The murderer is with us—on the train now . . .”

Just after midnight, the famous Orient Express is stopped in its tracks by a snowdrift. By morning, the millionaire Samuel Edward Ratchett lies dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. Without a shred of doubt, one of his fellow passengers is the murderer.

Isolated by the storm, detective Hercule Poirot must find the killer among a dozen of the dead man’s enemies, before the murderer decides to strike again.

 

THE AUTHOR

 

Dame Agatha Christie was born in 1890 and created the detective Hercule Poirot in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). She achieved wide popularity with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and produced a total of eighty novels and short-story collections over six decades.

 

 

 

 

 

THE FIRST LINE

It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria.

 

MY THOUGHTS

Like most of Dame Christie’s stories that I’ve read, it was so long ago I don’t remember much about it—except how much I liked it!

 

 

#Blogwords, First Line Friday, #FLF, Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie

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BLOGWORDS – Friday 17 May 2019 – FIRST LINE FRIDAY – EVIL UNDER THE SUN by AGATHA CHRISTIE

FIRST LINE FRIDAY – EVIL UNDER THE SUN by AGATHA CHRISTIE

 

Welcome to First Line Fridays, hosted by Hoarding Books!!!

 

Tell us your first line in the comments & then head over to Hoarding Books to see who else is participating!

 

 

THE BLURB

The classic Evil Under the Sun, one of the most famous of Agatha Christie’s Poirot investigations, has the fastidious sleuth on the trail of the killer of a sun-bronzed beauty whose death brings some rather shocking secrets into the light.

 

The beautiful bronzed body of Arlena Stuart lay face down on the beach. But strangely, there was no sun and Arlena was not sunbathing…she had been strangled.

 

Ever since Arlena’s arrival the air had been thick with sexual tension. Each of the guests had a motive to kill her, including Arlena’s new husband. But Hercule Poirot suspects that this apparent “crime of passion” conceals something much more evil.

 

THE AUTHOR

Agatha Christie was born in 1890 and created the detective Hercule Poirot in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). She achieved wide popularity with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and produced a total of eighty novels and short-story collections over six decades.

THE FIRST LINE

When Captain Roger Angmering built himself a house in the year 1872 on the island off Leathercombe Bay, it was thought the height of eccentricity on his part.

 

MY THOUGHTS

Like most of Dame Christie’s stories that I’ve read, it was so long ago I don’t remember much about it—except how much I liked it!

 

 

#Blogwords, First Line Friday, #FLF, Evil Under the Sun, Agatha Christie

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BLOGWORDS – Friday 10 May 2019 – FIRST LINE FRIDAY – DEATH ON THE NILE by AGATHA CHRISTIE

FIRST LINE FRIDAY – DEATH ON THE NILE by AGATHA CHRISTIE

 

Welcome to First Line Fridays, hosted by Hoarding Books!!!

 

Tell us your first line in the comments & then head over to Hoarding Books to see who else is participating!

 

 

THE BLURB

Beloved detective Hercule Poirot embarks on a journey to Egypt in one of Agatha Christie’s most famous mysteries, Death on the Nile.

The tranquility of a cruise along the Nile was shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway had been shot through the head. She was young, stylish, and beautiful. A girl who had everything . . . until she lost her life.

Hercule Poirot recalled an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: “I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger.” Yet in this exotic setting nothing is ever quite what it seems.

 

THE AUTHOR

 

Agatha Christie was born in 1890 and created the detective Hercule Poirot in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). She achieved wide popularity with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and produced a total of eighty novels and short-story collections over six decades.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FIRST LINE

“Linnet Ridgeway!”

“That’s her,” said Mr. Burnaby, the landlord of the Three Crowns.

 

MY THOUGHTS

Another of Dame Christie’s stories that I am partial to—it was in reading this mystery that I recognized the process—Ms. Christie had to write the story “inside-out.” That is, she had to know the crime, then lay the clues and suspects, including a sufficient number of red herrings to throw the reader off track. What I hadn’t remembered was that it was a Hercule Poirot story.

 

 

#Blogwords, First Line Friday, #FLF, Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie

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BLOGWORDS – Friday 3 May 2019 – FIRST LINE FRIDAY – TEN LITTLE INDIANS by AGATHA CHRISTIE

 

FIRST LINE FRIDAY – TEN LITTLE INDIANS by AGATHA CHRISTIE

 

Welcome to First Line Fridays, hosted by Hoarding Books!!!

 

Tell us your first line in the comments & then head over to Hoarding Books to see who else is participating!

 

 

THE BLURB

Ten people, each with something to hide and something to fear, are invited to a isolated mansion on Indian Island by a host who, surprisingly, fails to appear. On the island they are cut off from everything but each other and the inescapable shadows of their own past lives. One by one, the guests share the darkest secrets of their wicked pasts. And one by one, they die…

 

Which among them is the killer and will any of them survive?

 

THE AUTHOR

Agatha Christie was born in 1890 and created the detective Hercule Poirot in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). She achieved wide popularity with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and produced a total of eighty novels and short-story collections over six decades.

THE FIRST LINE

In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in The Times.

 

MY THOUGHTS

I am partial to this story, not only because it was my introduction to Dame Christie, but because when I was cast as Dr. Armstrong in my high school production when I was fifteen. NOTE: In Dame Christie’s writing, Dr. Armstrong was a man, but my convincing British accent earned me the role.

I have been a fan of her writing ever since. The twisting story, high suspicion, red herrings earned this story a place in my Hall of Favorites.

 

 

#Blogwords, First Line Friday, #FLF, And Then There Were None OR Ten Little Indians, Agatha Christie, Dr. Anne Armstrong

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BLOGWORDS – Friday 26 April 2019 – FIRST LINE FRIDAY – PERSUASION by JANE AUSTEN

 

FIRST LINE FRIDAY – PERSUASION by JANE AUSTEN

 

Welcome to First Line Fridays, hosted by Hoarding Books!!!

 

Tell us your first line in the comments & then head over to Hoarding Books to see who else is participating!

 

 

THE BLURB:    

At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen’s last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.

 

THE AUTHOR:    

Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen’s plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security.

THE FIRST LINE:   

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, became a person who, for his very own leisure, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he discovered occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties have been roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.

 

MY THOUGHTS:    

I know I’ve either seen or read this one, but honestly I can’t remember…

 

 

#Blogwords, First Line Friday, #FLF, Persuasion, Jane Austen

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BLOGWORDS – Friday 19 April 2019 – FIRST LINE FRIDAY – NORTHANGER ABBEY by JANE AUSTEN

FIRST LINE FRIDAY – NORTHANGER ABBEY by JANE AUSTEN

 

Welcome to First Line Fridays, hosted by Hoarding Books!!!

 

Tell us your first line in the comments & then head over to Hoarding Books to see who else is participating!

 

 

THE BLURB:    

Northanger Abbey was the first of Jane Austen’s novels to be completed for publication, in 1803. However, it was not until after her death in 1817 that it was published, along with her other novel, Persuasion. The novel is a satire of Gothic novels, which were quite popular at the time in 1798–99. This “coming of age,” story revolves around the main character, Catherine, a young and naive “heroine,” who entertains her reader on her journey of self-knowledge, as she gains a better understanding of the world and those around her. Because of her experiences, reality sets in and she discovers that she is not like other women who crave for wealth or social acceptance, but instead she is a true heroine in that she is an ordinary young woman who wishes to have nothing but happiness and a genuine sense of morality.

 

THE AUTHOR:    

Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen’s plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security.

THE FIRST LINE:   

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her to be born an heroine.

 

MY THOUGHTS:    

This is one of Jane Austen’s books I actually have read, though it’s been far too long. As with all her stories, I was immersed in her story world and caught up in Catherine’s journey of discovery.

 

 

#Blogwords, First Line Friday, #FLF, Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

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BLOGWORDS – Friday 12 April 2019 – FIRST LINE FRIDAY – EMMA by JANE AUSTEN

FIRST LINE FRIDAY – EMMA by JANE AUSTEN

 

Welcome to First Line Fridays, hosted by Hoarding Books!!!

Tell us your first line in the comments & then head over to Hoarding Books to see who else is participating!

 

 

THE BLURB:    

When her former governess finds happiness as the bride of a local widower, the brilliant and beautiful Emma Woodhouse — one of Jane Austen’s immortal creations — flatters herself that she alone has secured the marriage and that she possesses a special talent for bringing lovers together. The young heiress next busies herself with finding a suitable husband for her friend and protégé, Harriet Smith, setting off an entertaining sequence of comic mishaps and misunderstanding in this sparkling comedy of English-village romance. Beneath its considerable wit, the novel is also the story of a young woman’s progress toward self-understanding.
“Emma” abounds in the droll character sketches at which Jane Austen excelled. In addition to the well-intentional heroine and her hypochondriacal father, the village of Highbury during the Regency period is populated by an amusing circle of friends and family — kindhearted but tedious Miss Bates, a chatterbox spinster; ambitious Mr. Elton, a social-climbing parson; Frank Churchill, an enigmatic Romeo; Mr. Knightley, Emma’s brother-in-law and the voice of her better nature; and a cluster of other finely drawn, unforgettable personalities.
The author’s skill at depicting the follies of human nature in a manner both realistic and affectionate elevates this tale of provincial matchmaking to the heights of scintillating satire.

 

THE AUTHOR:    

Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen’s plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security.

THE FIRST LINE:   

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

 

MY THOUGHTS:    

I loved how Emma inserts herself into the lives of those around her—and doesn’t even recognize her own heart.

 

 

#Blogwords, First Line Friday, #FLF, Emma, Jane Austen

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BLOGWORDS – Friday 5 April 2019 – FIRST LINE FRIDAY – MANSFIELD PARK by JANE AUSTEN

 

FIRST LINE FRIDAY – MANSFIELD PARK by JANE AUSTEN

 

Welcome to First Line Fridays, hosted by Hoarding Books!!!

 

Tell us your first line in the comments & then head over to Hoarding Books to see who else is participating!

 

 

THE BLURB:    

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.

At a young age, impoverished Fanny Price is sent to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle at their estate called Mansfield Park. In each stage of life, from the age of 10 to adolescence to young adulthood, Fanny encounters a number of people pursuing wealth, status, or pleasure at any cost. To Fanny, she sees very little redeeming qualities in such pursuits, but will her experiences out in the real world lead her to believe that marrying for these underlying conditions supersede marrying for love and happiness?

 

THE AUTHOR:    

Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen’s plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security.

THE FIRST LINE:   

About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.

 

MY THOUGHTS:    

Something of a censure of society, and judgements made based on monetary wealth and status.

 

 

#Blogwords, First Line Friday, #FLF, Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

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BLOGWORDS – Friday 29 March 2019 – FIRST LINE FRIDAY – PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by JANE AUSTEN

FIRST LINE FRIDAY – PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by JANE AUSTEN

 

Welcome to First Line Fridays, hosted by Hoarding Books!!!

Tell us your first line in the comments & then head over to Hoarding Books to see who else is participating!

 

 

THE BLURB:    

Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character, Elizabeth Bennet, as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of the British Regency. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country gentleman living near the fictional town of Meryton in Hertfordshire, near London… Set in England in the early 19th century, Pride and Prejudice tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet’s five unmarried daughters after the rich and eligible Mr. Bingley and his status-conscious friend, Mr. Darcy, have moved into their neighbourhood. While Bingley takes an immediate liking to the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane, Darcy has difficulty adapting to local society and repeatedly clashes with the second-eldest Bennet daughter, Elizabeth.

 

THE AUTHOR:    

Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen’s plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security.

THE FIRST LINE:   

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

 

MY THOUGHTS:    

I will ever be enamored of this story solely owing to Colin Firth in the role of William Darcy. Not really, the story speaks for itself, and is not only a classic but is a favorite of mine.

 

 

#Blogwords, First Line Friday, #FLF, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

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