First Paragraph/Teaser Tuesday: The Guilty Dead by P. J. Tracy

Every Tuesday Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posted the first paragraph of a book she is reading or planning to read. In 2018, Vicki from I'd Rather Be at the Beach is taking over this meme.

Here's mine:

Hollywood Hills, California

"Gus Riskin sipped from a bottle of water as he surveyed Trey's living room. What he saw infuriated and disgusted him. The priceless Persian rug beneath his feet was filthy, pockmarked with cigarette burns and littered with the castoffs of dissolute life: pizza and take-out boxes of indeterminate age now house skittering colonies of roaches, empty beer bottles and martini glasses had drooled out their meager remains, leaving crunchy spots on the expensive silk pile; drug paraphernalia and detritus were scattered around the room like grotesque confetti. Something somewhere was putrefying, or maybe the whole house was so fetid with human decay, both physical and moral, it had permanently saturated the air. None of this was his problem, but he still found it deeply offensive."

 

Link up here. It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! Everyone loves Teaser Tuesday.

Here's mine:

The road was clogged with morning commuters on their pilgrimage to the daily grind. 

This week I am spotlighting The Guilty Dead by P. J. Tracy. I got this ARC for review from NetGalley. Here is the description from Amazon:

Gregory Norwood is Minnesota’s most beloved philanthropist, and the story of his son’s overdose was splashed across the front page of all the papers. When a photojournalist sets out to get a candid shot of the highly successful businessman on the one year anniversary of his son’s death, he’s shocked to find Norwood dead with a smoking gun in his hand. The city is devastated, and Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are called in to handle the delicate case. It should be open and shut, but something is not right. Norwood's death is no suicide.

With no suspects and an increasing tangle of digital evidence that confounds the Minneapolis Police Department’s most seasoned cops, Magozzi calls on Grace MacBride, Monkeewrench Software’s founder and chief computer genius and the soon to be mother of their child together. She and her motley crew of partners begin to unravel connections between Norwood’s death and an even larger plot. Norwood wasn’t the first, won’t be the last, and by the end, may be just one of many to die. The breakneck, high stakes race to find his killer and save the lives of hundreds make P. J. Tracy's The Guilty Dead her most outstanding novel yet.