TUESDAY POTPOURRI: INTROS/TEASERS – “RUIN FALLS”

 

 

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by Should Be Reading.

Tuesdays are great!  Don’t you love them?  The week is in full swing, and it’s our opportunity to visit blogs and read excerpts.  Today I am sharing one of my review books, an ARC from Amazon Vine:  Ruin Falls, by Jenny Milchman.

 

 

 

Intro:  The children had never been this far from home before.  Liz had spent most of yesterday driving around, hunting for no-mess Crayola coloring books, praying they weren’t too juvenile to keep a six- and eight-year-old occupied in the car, then running up and down the supermarket aisles in search of bars and snack pouches in case they couldn’t find food on the road.  Or in case they did find something, and Paul wouldn’t allow the kids to eat it.

Now the hours had ticked by, four of them, and it seemed they were no closer to their destination than they had been when they left home.  Descending from the mountains of Wedeskyull had presented a stark contrast and it felt like they were really traveling.  But the view outside the windows ever since had been made up of little besides cornfields.  Liz wouldn’t have believed how bleak acres and acres of green could appear when the crop was so unvarying.  The road they were driving on hadn’t dipped or risen for thirty minutes.  It was a flat length of asphalt, inky mirages always shimmering just ahead.

***

Teaser:  In the few moments she’d been able to attain unconsciousness last night, her rest had been overrun by what she’d learned on that website Paul had visited.  Or what she hadn’t learned.  Letters danced through the shards of her dreams.  P’s and E’s and W’s. (p. 123).

***

Blurb:  Liz Daniels has every reason to be happy about setting off on a rare family vacation, leaving behind her remote home in the Adirondack Mountains for a while. Instead, she feels uneasy. Her children, eight-year-old Reid and six-year-old Ally, have met their paternal grandparents only a handful of times. But Liz’s husband, Paul, has decided that, despite a strained relationship with his mother and father, they should visit the farm in western New York where he spent his childhood.

On their way to the farm, the family stops at a hotel for the night. In the morning, when Liz goes to check on her sleeping children, all her anxiety comes roaring back: Ally and Reed are nowhere to be found. Blind panic slides into ice-cold terror as the hours tick by without anyone finding a trace of the kids. Soon, Paul and Liz are being interviewed by police, an Amber Alert is issued, and detectives are called in.

Frantic worry and helplessness threaten to overtake Liz’s mind—but in a sudden, gut-wrenching instant she realizes that it was no stranger who slipped into the hotel room that night. Someone she trusted completely has betrayed her. Though she knows that Ally and Reid are safe, Liz will stop at nothing to find them and get them back. From her guarded in-laws’ unwelcoming farmhouse to the deep woods of her own hometown, Liz follows the threads of a terrible secret to uncover a hidden world created from dreams and haunted by nightmares.

***

Doesn’t this sound intense?  I am so looking forward to it.  Would you keep reading?  What are you sharing today?

***