Welcome, everyone, to my third Friday Fragments post. This is where I join in on three Friday blog memes. The first is First Line Friday, hosted by Carrie over at Reading is my Super Power. For this, you post the first line of the book nearest you. The second is Book Beginnings, which is hosted by Gilion over at Rose City Reader. For this one you share the opening sentence or two of a current, previous, or upcoming read, or any other book you want to highlight. And finally, there’s Friday56, hosted by Anne at My Head is Full of Books. For this you pick any book you want and post a (non-spoiler!) snippet from page 56, or 56% for digital books. I always have multiple books on the go, though, so I’m going to add a personal rule for myself: I have to use a different book for each of the three memes; no doubling up.

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First Line Friday

I fell in love for the first time on a misty Saturday night, in the psychedelic neon glow of London’s Leicester Square.

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In Small Worlds, Gail Vida Hamburg delivers a collection of flash fiction and microfiction that captures the messy, often absurd architecture of human lives—compressed into moments of sharp beauty, sly humor, and unsettling truth.

From slow dances that never end, to customer service calls that turn into romances, to rebellious seniors plotting a great escape, these stories chronicle the intimate and the epic in miniature. Here, love is both a balm and a weapon. Loneliness births imaginary friends. Deviants justify cruelty with high-minded philosophy. And in the end, everyone is seeking — connection, redemption, or simply a way out.

(description from The StoryGraph)

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Book Beginnings

“Mistakes abounded? That’s the best you can come up with?”

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Whit Callister, a disgraced, former high-profile sports agent, is found dead in his Santa Monica pool – ankles zip tied, hands cuffed behind his back, and gagged. Across town, Dr. April Gilpin, his ex-wife, is informed by the police that her twelve-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son disappeared from school during lunch and never returned.

She receives a “ransom note” – insults and threats, but no real solutions – warning that the children had just seventy-two hours of air before they die, and nine have already been used. The Santa Monica PD jump on the case, which is complicated by the fact that Callister previously testified, and Gilpin provided evidence, in a huge sports gambling scandal involving Georgian organized crime.

Meanwhile, Mitch Hutton, April’s first husband and the children’s biological father, is visiting from London and inquiring about seeing the kids and “getting to know them better.”

The Santa Monica PD’s Homicide team – Lieutenant Greg Nichols, Sergeant Mollie Granger, and Detective Nour El Masry – is on the case, but the Georgians, law-enforcement rivalries, and personal tragedies push them up against the impending deadline.

(description from Amazon)

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Friday56

Elmer Fudd trying to terminate Bugs Bunny. Cwazy wabbit. Boom-boom, bang-bang, whapitta-whapitta-whap, thud, clunk, hoo-ha, around and around in perpetual pursuit.

In the kitchen, Heather hugged Mae Hong and whispered, ‘Don’t let him watch any regular channels, where he might see a news brief.’

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Eduardo is a lonely retiree living on his isolated Montana ranch. His life is peaceful, until one night he is awakened by a fearful throbbing sound and eerie lights in the woods. More mysterious and disturbing events follow over the next few months. Eduardo begins to fear for his sanity and his life, until the terrible night when someone – or something – knocks on his back door…

One lovely spring morning in Los Angeles, cop Jack McGarvey is hammered by submachine-gun fire when a madman goes berserk. He barely survives. Jack longs to move his wife and son to a more peaceful place away from the city, but he feels utterly powerless and without prospects. In their hour of desperation, the McGarvey family receives an unexpected inheritance in the shape of a sprawling ranch in one of the most beautiful, peaceful places in the country: Montana.

The family sets out from Los Angeles to begin their new life, unaware that the terror-riddled city will soon seem like a safe haven compared to what lies ahead.

(description from Goodreads)

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© Adele Walker October 2025