First Line Friday | September 18, 2020

Happy Friday! Today I am participating in First Line Friday, hosted by Hoarding Books, AND First Lines Friday, hosted by Wandering Words!

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?

• 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!

“Fate came for Dottie Epstein a year earlier, in the form of a call to the principal’s office. It was not her first time there. Dolores Epstein wasn’t sent for any of the normal reasons- fighting, cheating, failing, absence. Dottie would get called down for more complicated matters: designing her own chemistry experiments, questioning her teacher’s understanding of non-euclidean geometry, or reading books in class because there was nothing new to be learned, so the time might as well be spent doing something useful.”

I’m intrigued! Anyone have any guesses on what book this is? I’ll give you a few clues…

Last chance to guess!

Today’s book is…

Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson
Series: Truly Devious #1
Also in this series: The Box in the Woods
Published on January 16, 2018 by Katherine Tegen Books
Genres: YA, Contemporary, Mystery, Thriller
Pages: 420
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Author Links: Website, Blog, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram

Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.”
Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym “Truly, Devious.” It became one of the great unsolved crimes of American history.
True-crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novelist, the actor, the artist, and the jokester. But something strange is happening. Truly Devious makes a surprise return, and death revisits Ellingham Academy. The past has crawled out of its grave. Someone has gotten away with murder. 
The two interwoven mysteries of this first book in the Truly Devious series dovetail brilliantly, and Stevie Bell will continue her relentless quest for the murderers in books two and three.

“Fate came for Dottie Epstein a year earlier, in the form of a call to the principal’s office. It was not her first time there.”

I started reading Truly Devious at lunch today, and even though I’m only on the first page, I’m already loving it! I’ll be listening to it as an audiobook, so I’m excited to keep listening on my way home.

Do you participate in either of these memes? Let me know if you do and link your posts in the comments so I can visit! And don’t forget to have a splendiferous week!