Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! The opening pages of Kate Atkinson’s Death at the Sign of the Rook took me back to an Agatha Christie-style setup: the enigmatic invite to a lavish estate, Mother Nature’s elements cutting the cast off from civilization, and…well the protagonist Jackson Brodie is not Poirot, nor should he try to be. This is my first Brodie novel, and I love that my very first interaction with him involves him wishing he could kill off the other guests on that estate. There’s a Poirot-ish character in the group, yup, and the second chapter even riffs on a Poirot novel title, but Brodie’s manners observations, and recollections are nothing like the fastidious Belgian detective—and that’s totally fine by me. While Chapter 1 technically starts further on in time than Chapter 2, I don’t feel like Atkinson pulled any sort of bait’n’switch. The first couple of pages are low-stakes with the eclectic guests of the murder mystery party, and the next couple of pages focus on the detective Brodie investigating an art theft—an art theft that must eventually bring him to that same expensive party. Atkinson does lovely work using just a line or two of dialogue with a tag to give a glimpse of the characters, and it’s just enough to promise something ominous without being dramatic or shocking about it. Quite the master-work as far as openers go! And what will we discover in the following story's pages? We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!