First Lines Friday – #Orentober edition #5

Hi and welcome to First Lines Friday – #Orentober edition!

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

I love this feature, and I thought it would be a fun way to shine the spotlights on some fab Orenda books. So here goes:

Her dad took much longer to burn than she expected.

That was not the way I expected this novel to start, I can tell you that 😳

Jenny watched the deep flames lick his body, curl around his chest and crotch, whisper in his ear. His thin hair crisped then turned to smoke, grey sinewy strands reaching into the mottled sky. A sprig of juniper in his hand caught alight and threw out blue sparks, and Jenny smelt the scent, reminding her of gin.

I’m sure that if you’ve read this book, that first line stuck with you, but if you haven’t, can you guess the book???

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Which Orenda powerhouse wrote this rather gruesome opening line?

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It is…. a he, and he’s a musician as well as an author.

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And this is a line from the first book of a series…

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It came out earlier this year, and the second instalment came out this summer…

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And I’m ravenous for more…

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It is:

This is the blurb and you can find my review here, if you’d like to know more:

Meet the Skelfs: well-known Edinburgh family, proprietors of a long-established funeral-home business, and private investigators. When patriarch Jim dies, it’s left to his wife Dorothy, daughter Jenny and granddaughter Hannah to take charge of both businesses, kicking off an unexpected series of events. Dorothy discovers mysterious payments to another woman, suggesting that Jim wasn’t the husband she thought he was. Hannah’s best friend Mel has vanished from university, and the simple adultery case that Jenny takes on leads to something stranger and far darker than any of them could have imagined. As the women struggle to come to terms with their grief, and the demands of the business threaten to overwhelm them, secrets from the past emerge, which change everything.
A compelling, tense and shocking thriller and a darkly funny and warm portrait of a family in turmoil, A Dark Matter introduces a cast of unforgettable characters, marking the start of an addictive new series.

Thanks for stopping by! What do you make of this first line, yay or nay? Let me know below!