THURSDAY SPARKS: THEMES & BOOKING — OCT. 25

 

Welcome to another day of bookish delight, as we celebrate two events.

Theme Thursdays, hosted by Reading Between Pages, is all about finding themes in the books we read and enjoying the writing styles of the authors we explore.

Booking Through Thursday is like a conversation amongst bloggers in response to a prompt issued each week.

Come on by and join in the fun!

Theme Thursdays:

The themes we discover in our bookish explorations show us a bit about an author’s descriptive style of writing.

 

The theme for this week is

TIME , hour, minutes, seconds, duration etc.

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Today I’m spotlighting a mystery from Lauren Carr:  Dead on Ice.

Snippet:  Slipping his arm across her shoulders, Joshua introduced her to Albert.  “Cameron and I have been seeing each other since this past summer.  She’s a homicide detective with the Pennsylvania State Police.”

Snippet:  “But it’s like he’s aged twenty years overnight.  I think I’m going to invite him to dinner after church this Sunday.”

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Blurb:  Dead on Ice is the first installment of Lauren Carr’s new series (Lovers in Crime) featuring Hancock County Prosecuting Attorney Joshua Thornton and Pennsylvania State Police homicide detective Cameron Gates. Spunky Cameron Gates is tasked with solving the murder of Cherry Pickens, a legendary star of pornographic films, whose body turns up in an abandoned freezer. The case has a personal connection to her lover, Joshua Thornton, because the freezer was located in his cousin’s basement. It doesn’t take long for their investigation to reveal that the risqué star’s roots were buried in their rural Ohio Valley community, something that Cherry had kept off her show business bio. She should have kept her hometown off her road map, too—because when this starlet came running home from the mob, it proved to be a fatal homecoming.

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Booking Through Thursday:

The flip side of last week’s …

Are there any good books that you read IN SPITE OF the cover and ended up wondering what on earth the artist and publisher were thinking to pair up a cover that so badly represented a perfectly good book?

And … if you didn’t like the cover, what made you pick up the book? The author? Assigned reading from school? A recommendation from a friend?

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I don’t like the covers of the Stieg Larsson books, but I’d heard a lot about them…so I read the first one and I’m planning to read the second.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was definitely compelling…once I got into it.

 

And Shades of Murder, by Lauren Carr, had a cover that didn’t really grab me, either.  But I have enjoyed the books by this author.

 

And I didn’t really HATE either of these covers, but they didn’t compel me to pick up the books.

Scrolling through my reading lists for the past two years, I didn’t find that many covers that were unappealing or didn’t match the book.  Perhaps the covers are very influential in my actual picks!

What about you?  What pulls you in and keeps you reading?