I spend a lot of time on the first few pages of each book. If I have done my work well, those pages, and especially the first few paragraphs, will encourage the reader to keep reading. Here are some examples from my Simon Grave Mysteries series.

1:  A Grave Misunderstanding

  “Her naked body was displayed just so, arms and legs splayed like a paper doll, head gently resting on the bottom step as if she had slid down the staircase on her back, blond hair carefully fanned out to form a waterfall to the foyer floor, a single red rose placed between her teeth in a way that suggested flamenco dancing, a child’s suction-cup arrow sticking out from her forehead, and most disturbing, an emoji painted on her belly with red paint, its eyes crosses, indicating death, its mouth the poor woman’s belly button, giving the emoji a look of both surprise and dismay. All this gave Detective Simon Grave the distinct feeling that lunch would be delayed.”

2:  Simon Grave and the Curious Incident of the Cat in the Daytime

“Her long-sleeved black dress and preternaturally tiny waist gave her the appearance of a segmented insect as she scurried through the buzzing crowd from food station to food station, gnawing at cheeses and nibbling at hors d’oeuvres, her head on a swivel, looking for the next delectable morsel or more, perhaps a whole ham or prime rib of beef she could grasp in her mandibles and drag back to the nest. Detective Simon Grave looked down at his empty wine glass, his third, then set it aside on a nearby tray. Enough was enough.”

3:  Simon Grave and the Drone of the Basque Orvilles

“Whir, whoosh, zoom! The sound was near deafening as forty-three drones, one for each diner at Le Crabe Bleu, tested the limits of synonyms as they hovered, bustled, scuttled, scrambled, scampered, and generally fluttered about overhead. Some went this way, some went that, and still others just hovered. But all had the same goal: fussing over their owners. The result was a pulsating din of humming, droning, whirring, and buzzing, with an occasional hiss or fizzy lifting sound thrown in.”

4: Simon Grave and the Sons of Irony

“Life can be ironic, death even more so. Or at least that’s what Chase “Superman” Arnold, president of the Krypto Knights, was thinking as he pushed through the doors of the Sons of Irony clubhouse. He didn’t know exactly what irony meant, but he knew it was at least clever and seemed to be as good a descriptor as any for what he was about to do.”

5: Simon Grave and School of Casual Invisibility

“Jeremy Polk, Crab Cove’s diminutive medical examiner looked down at nothing, and seeing nothing, looked up into the face of the Class 7 simdroid officer, who towered over him. “What is this, some kind of joke? The simdroid, Officer Larry, one of many Officer Larrys on the force, all dead ringers for the long-dead actor Morgan Freeman, intoned what he thought would be a satisfactory reply, one selected from his database of sonorous utterances. ‘Not everything seen is visible.’”

6: Simon Grave and the Wrath of Grapes

“In the beginning, there was something in the nothing and everything in the something. A highly compact little mass, dense as all get-out and containing nothing less than the future, came from seemingly out of nowhere to sit poised and alert in the nothingness, waiting for something to happen in a place it found convenient to wait.”

Coming next: My Typical Workday