Friday Memes: May Day by Jess Lourey

 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. 

The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda at Freda's Voice. This meme is currently on hiatus but many of us are still including a sentence from page 56 or from 56% of the ebook. Anne @ Head Full of Books is picking up the slack until Freda is ready to return. I think this link will get you to the correct place. 

Beginning:

Today marked my tenth day alone at the library, and the heady thrill of being my own boss wasn't cutting it anymore.

Friday 56:

I stepped out and stretched in the temperate night air. No way could I go to sleep with all this tension in my shoulders. Some gardening would clear my mood. 

This week I am spotlighting May Day by Jess Lourey. I have had this first book in the Murder by Month series on my TBR pile since March 27, 2010. Early in May the revised Kindle edition and the audiobook were both on sale with the Kindle copy being $2.49 and the audiobook $1.99. Since I had been meaning to read this book sometime, the sale prices meant that the time had come. I was originally drawn to the book because the book is set in Minnesota. I once had a roommate who called Battle Lake her hometown. 

Here's the description from Amazon:

A waitress turned librarian just wants a new life. What she ends up with is a killer change of pace in a funny, snappy, and suspenseful mystery by Edgar Award–nominated author Jess Lourey.

With a cheating boyfriend, a thankless career in waitressing, and her BA in English going to waste, Mira James jumps at the chance for a fresh start in rural Battle Lake, Minnesota.

Right away she lands a job as a librarian, snags another as an on-call reporter for the weekly newspaper, and is swept off her feet by Jeff Wilson, a handsome archaeologist unearthing the town’s storied history. Moving here might be the best decision Mira’s ever made. Until she finds Jeff’s body between the library’s reference stacks. It seems Mira didn’t really know her drop-dead gorgeous new lover at all. But someone in Otter Tail County surely did.

Behind this quirky town’s polite exterior are decades-old grudges still unsettled, and murderous secrets best kept hidden. Whatever dangers are buried in Battle Lake’s past, now it’s Mira’s turn to start digging.