First Lines Friday – 02 October

October 2, 2020October 2, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads12 Comments

Happy Friday book lovers! We’re back with another First Lines Friday, 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? Here are the rules:

Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
Finally… reveal the book!

First lines:

“For a trial lawyer, there are two words in the English language that terrify us more than any other.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

Book Review: Force of Nature by Jane Harper

September 5, 2020October 16, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads10 Comments

Goodreads: Force of Nature (Aaron Falk #2)
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Publication Date: 06 February 2018
Genre: Mystery Thriller

Panda Rating:

(4 pandas)

FIVE WOMEN GO ON A HIKE.
ONLY FOUR RETURN.

When five colleagues are forced to go on a corporate retreat in the wilderness, they reluctantly pick up their backpacks and start walking down the nuddy path. After all, this retreat is supposed to take the office workers out of their air-conditioned comfort zone. It’s supposed to be abonding experience. It’s supposed to be a bonding experience. It’s supposed to build trust.
But it doesn’t work out that way.
One of the women doesn’t come out of the woods. And each of her companions tellsa slightly different story about what happened.
Federal Agent Aaron Falk has a keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing hiker. Alice Russell is the whistleblower in his latest case–and in just a matter of weeks, she was supposed to help him bring down both the company she works for and the people she works with.
In an investigation that takes him deep into isolated bushland, Falk discovers secrets lurking in the mountains and a tangled web of personal friendship, suspicion, and betrayal among the hikers. But did that lead to murder?

First Lines Friday – 14 August

August 14, 2020August 14, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads13 Comments

Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
Finally… reveal the book!

First lines:

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

First Lines Friday – 06 March

March 6, 2020March 6, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads13 Comments

Happy Friday book lovers! We’re back with another First Lines Friday, 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? Here are the rules:

Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
Finally… reveal the book!

First lines:

“Sweet sixteen is when the claws come out. We’re all flash tonight. Jenny and Summer and Mads and me. Vodka and heels that we could never quite walk in before, but tonight we can.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

Goodreads Monday – 30 December

December 30, 2019December 30, 2019 Dini @ dinipandareads4 Comments

It’s the last Goodreads Monday in 2019! This weekly meme was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners and it invites you to pick a book from your TBR and explain why you want to read it. Easy enough, right? Feel free to join in if you want to! I’ll be using a random number generator to pick my books from my insanely long GR Want-to-read list.

This week’s book is I Hope You Get This Message by Farah Naz Rishi. This was added to my Goodreads TBR in April this year. I admit the cover is what drew me in at first but the synopsis also caught my attention. This book is a young adult science fiction that was released this past October and has 3.67 stars with 881 ratings and 246 reviews.

Sundays in Bed With… #MyWeeklyWrapUp [35]

December 23, 2019December 4, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads3 Comments

Yes, I’m well aware it’s no longer Sunday but wow, this weekend went by so quickly and didn’t feel like a weekend at all… So we’re back with another ~~Sundays~~Mondays in Bed With… meme! This meme dares to ask you what book has been in your bed this morning and is hosted by Midnight Book Girl. Come share what book you’ve been you’ve spent time curled up reading in bed with, or which book you wish you had time to read today!

I spent yesterday stuck in a car for about 9 hours because of roadwork that caused major traffic. Fun times. But that meant I got to spend more time with Sadie. So glad I decided to follow this one on audiobook because the full-cast was really great and helped me build a deeper connection with the characters, which I feel wouldn’t have happened had I only read the book.

A missing girl on a journey of revenge. A Serial―like podcast following the clues she’s left behind. And an ending you won’t be able to stop talking about.

Sadie hasn’t had an easy life. Growing up on her own, she’s been raising her sister Mattie in an isolated small town, trying her best to provide a normal life and keep their heads above water.

But when Mattie is found dead, Sadie’s entire world crumbles. After a somewhat botched police investigation, Sadie is determined to bring her sister’s killer to justice and hits the road following a few meager clues to find him.

When West McCray―a radio personality working on a segment about small, forgotten towns in America―overhears Sadie’s story at a local gas station, he becomes obsessed with finding the missing girl. He starts his own podcast as he tracks Sadie’s journey, trying to figure out what happened, hoping to find her before it’s too late.

The Snowman (Harry Hole #7) by Jo Nesbø – #BookReview

December 19, 2019December 18, 2019 Dini @ dinipandareads10 Comments

Goodreads: The Snowman
Genre: Crime, Mystery, Thriller, Fiction
Panda Rating:

Soon the first snow will come
A young boy wakes to find his mother missing. Outside, he sees her favourite scarf – wrapped around the neck of a snowman.
And then he will appear again
Detective Harry Hole soon discovers that an alarming number of wives and mothers have gone missing over the years.
And when the snow is gone…
When a second woman disappears, Harry’s worst suspicion is confirmed: a serial killer is operating on his home turf.
…he will have taken someone else

This was my first Harry Hole novel and my first book by Nesbø, and while I enjoyed The Snowman and its compelling plot, I also found I struggled with the writing and it took me longer than expected to get through the book. I enjoyed it though and I’m even curious enough to one day check out more of Nesbø’s novels, especially the ones involving Harry Hole! I’m certainly wondering what’ll happen to him next.

Goodreads Monday – 16 December

December 16, 2019December 16, 2019 Dini @ dinipandareads4 Comments

We’re back with another Goodreads Monday, a weekly meme started by @Lauren’s Page Turners. This meme invites you to pick a book from your TBR and explain why you want to read it. Easy enough, right? Feel free to join in if you want to! I’ll be using a random number generator to pick my books from my insanely long GR Want-to-read list.

This week’s book is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind. I surprisingly only added this book to my Goodreads TBR in 2018 but I first heard about it back in 2006/7! So while it hasn’t been on my GR TBR for long, it’s been a known entity for a while! It’s a historical fiction, horror and thriller that has 4.02 stars with 286k+ ratings and 12.9k+ reviews. Pretty good ratings, I think!

Bury the Lede by Gaby Dunn, Claire Roe – #eARC #BookReview

December 1, 2019February 1, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads3 Comments

Goodreads: Bury the Lede
Publish date: 08 October 2019
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Genre: Crime Thriller, Mystery, Graphic Novel, LGBTQ+
Panda Rating:

Twenty-one-year-old Madison T. Jackson is already the star of the Emerson College student newspaper when she nabs a coveted night internship at Boston’s premiere newspaper, The Boston Lede. The job’s simple: do whatever the senior reporters tell you to do, from fetching coffee to getting a quote from a grieving parent. It’s gruelling work, so when the murder of a prominent Boston businessman comes up on the police scanner, Madison races to the scene of the grisly crime. There, Madison meets the woman who will change her life forever: prominent socialite Dahlia Kennedy, who is covered in gore and being arrested for the murder of her family. The newspapers put everyone they can in front of her with no results until, with nothing to lose, Madison gets a chance – and unexpectedly barrels headfirst into danger she never anticipated.

I love discovering new graphic novels and I requested this because the cover hooked my interest, plus I don’t think never read a crime noir graphic novel/comic before! Bury the Lede was mostly what I anticipated it to be, although there were some elements that really grated on my nerves and that’s what made me only give it three stars.

TH1RT3EN (Eddie Flynn #4) by Steve Cavanagh – #eARC #BookReview

November 26, 2019November 28, 2019 Dini @ dinipandareads14 Comments

Goodreads: TH1RT3EN (Eddie Flynn #4)
Publish date: 13 August 2019
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Genre: Crime Thriller, Mystery
Panda Rating:

The serial killer isn’t on trial.
He’s on the jury…

They were Hollywood’s hottest power couple. They had the world at their feet. Now one of them is dead and Hollywood star Robert Solomon is charged with the brutal murder of his beautiful wife.

This is the celebrity murder trial of the century and the defence want one man on their team: con artist turned lawyer Eddie Flynn.

All the evidence points to Robert’s guilt, but as the trial begins a series of sinister incidents in the courtroom start to raise doubts in Eddie’s mind.

What if there’s more than one actor in the courtroom?
What if the killer isn’t on trial? What if the killer is on the jury?

Wow, what an incredible ride! Again, I’m facepalming myself for not reading this as soon as I got it on NetGalley because I loved every minute of this fast-paced courtroom drama and crime thriller. This book was like reading an episode of Criminal Minds and I could so clearly picture everything unfolding before me as if I watching it on TV. I knew I had to read this one as soon as I read the synopsis and saw that “the killer isn’t on trial, he’s on the jury”! I mean, is there a cleverer way of catching the reader’s attention with a blurb like that? It definitely worked it’s magic on me.