Happy Friday!
Book Beginnings is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader. She asks that the first sentence is posted along with the author and title of the book and the reader's initial thoughts on the sentence, the book, or anything else it inspires.
Carrie at Reading Is My Superpower.org also provides a linky for sharing first lines and connecting with others. This meme asks that the chosen books be PG or marked as Mature if they are not.
Beginning:
Had she known about the Seabrink curse, she might not have gone. Aubrey Spencer was on the hunt for photographs, not for ghosts.
Friday 56:
"The old envelope is addressed to Mrs. Gwen Peters, 125 Lenox Road, Bakersfield, California," read Nikki. "This must be the Bakerfield connection, right? And look, the return address is Seabrink Poor Farm and Asylum."
When a mysterious figure shows up in the photograph an architect takes of the derelict Seabrink Hotel, ghostly encounters and murder are unleashed.
Aubrey Spencer loves photographing classic old buildings and abandoned places that hold old secrets. The Hotel Seabrink, perched overlooking the sea, is one such place. Currently abandoned but scheduled for a major renovation, it has a torrid history. Back in the 1920s it hosted A-list celebrity clientele, and now the locals insist it is haunted by the ghosts of two young women who died there. When Aubrey goes to photograph the site before the renovation begins, she bumps into a man named Dimitri Petroff, a minor online celebrity who shares her fascination with old buildings, the Hotel Seabrink in particular.
When he is found dead the next day at the base of a cliff, the police are quick to close the investigation. But Aubrey feels unsettled by locals who claim he was murdered and that it’s not the first time someone interested in the hotel was killed. As she digs deeper into the property’s dark history (and its origins as an asylum) as well as Dimitri’s professional rivalries, she becomes mired in an unsolved murder case from several decades earlier, one with eerie parallels to the contemporary case. But someone is determined to keep her from discovering the truth—at any cost.
