This week, I am linking up again with Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea who hosts a post every Tuesday for people to share the first chapter / paragraph of the book they are reading, or thinking of reading soon. I really enjoy these tasters when I read them on other blogs so wanted to join in.

I haven’t actually started my next read yet but plan to this evening. It’s The Wrong Girl by Laura Wilson – the first book I’ll have read by this author, although I’ve heard good things in the past.

In 2006, three-year-old Phoebe Piper went missing on a family holiday. Despite massive publicity and a long investigation, no trace of her was ever found.

Seven years later, Molly Jackson, aged ten and recently uprooted to a Norfolk village, finds her great uncle Dan dead in his bed. Molly remembers nothing of her early years, but she’s been sure for ages that she is Phoebe. Everything in her life points to it and now, finally, she has proof.

Dan’s death brings his hippie sister Janice back to Norfolk where she’s re-united with Molly’s mother Suze, the daughter she gave up for adoption decades earlier. Janice discovers that a former lover, Joe Vincent, lives nearby. Joe was a rock star who, at the height of his fame, turned his back on public life.

As she is drawn back into the past, Janice begins to wonder if Dan’s death and Joe’s reputation as a reclusive acid casualty are quite what they appear…

And then Molly disappears

And here’s the opening paragraphs…

How was she supposed to know? She’d thought he was just really, really asleep, like when he’d been in the pub with Mark and them, and they all came in late and made a noise downstairs. He was still in his daytime clothes and the curtains weren’t pulled, but that was how he always slept when he’d been out the night before, and no one would want to get under a duvet when it was so boiling hot all the time, would they?

That’s why she’d gone to get her coloured pens, because he’d thought it was funny last time when she did Dan the Man in a heart on his arm and he’d woken up and seen it. She’d just started on the words, doing it really carefully because it was the hairy bit of his arm so it was quite difficult to make the letters neat. Then Mum had come in and started shouting, and slapped her hand away so hard that the pen flew right across the room”

What do you think? Would you keep on reading?

Emma