First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by @Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines? If you want to make your own post, just follow the rules below:
- Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
- Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
- Finally… reveal the book!
Here are the first lines of the book I am currently reading:
Even when I was a child, I knew I had a dark side. Sometimes it thrilled me, my wicked secret, but at other times it made me scared of what I could do.
I subdued it, but I was keeping caged a resourceful beast who would, eventually, learn to pick the lock. After the world went to hell, when we began to act according to our own instincts, judgement and needs, rather than the redundant rules of a reluctant society, ‘it’ became ‘he’, and broke free.
AND THE BOOK IS…
The Visitor by Terry Tyler
In 2024, a mystery virus ravages the entire world. ‘Bat Fever’ is highly contagious and one hundred per cent lethal.
A cottage tucked away in an isolated Norfolk village seems like the ideal place to sit out a catastrophic pandemic, but some residents of Hincham resent the arrival of Jack, Sarah and their friends, while others want to know too much about them.
What the villagers don’t know is that beneath Sarah’s cottage is a fully-stocked, luxury survival bunker. A post-apocalyptic ‘des res’.
Hincham isolates itself from the rest of the country, but the deaths continue―and not from the virus. There’s a killer on the loose, but is it a member of the much-depleted community, or somebody from outside? Paranoia is rife, as friend suspects friend, and everybody suspects the newcomers.
Most terrifying of all is that nobody knows who’s next on the list…
The Visitor is Terry Tyler’s twenty-second Amazon publication, and is set in the same world as her Project Renova series, while being a completely separate, stand-alone novel.
My thoughts so far…
I am about a third of the way through The Visitor so far and am really enjoying it.
I was concerned that the background situation of a bat flu pandemic with people dying left right and centre might be tough to read with our current Coronavirus pandemic in full swing. However, although I did find it tear-jerking when some of what seemed at the beginning to be main characters started to succumb to the virus, I think it is just far enough removed from our own pandemic to make it a compelling read.
The characters are all so realistic, I feel like they are people I’ve known in real life at one time or another. This realism makes their actions and decisions very believable and it is subsequently easier to become invested in their stories. It’s a very difficult book to put down. I am not yet able to guess who the murderer is, but am on the lookout for clues!! Buy this book – you won’t regret it!
Buy The Visitor here:
www.amazon.com/Visitor-Post-Apocalyptic-Murder-Mystery-ebook/dp/B08ML72P2K
Add The Visitor to your To Be Read list here:
www..goodreads.com/book/show/55932208-the-visitor
Contact the author, Terry Tyler here:
Sue's Musings 
Sue, thanks so much for featuring The Visitor on First Line Fridays – and I am DELIGHTED that you’re enjoying it! xx
(BTW, might interest you: because it’s the same pandemic as I wrote about in my Project Renova series, which I began in 2016, I obviously had to keep all factual detail in line with the first book in that series, Tipping Point. Although ‘my’ bat flu is a lot more serious, I was surprised, when re-reading TP before I wrote this, how many similarities there were!)
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