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?

1. Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
2. Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
3. Finally… reveal the book!

Happy weekend! I’ve been enjoying the beautiful weather this week and have spent most of my time in the garden reading & trying (but mostly failing) to get a tan. The book I’ve chosen to highlight this week is one that popped up on my twitter timeline and it sounded too intriguing to pass up.

Fatma el-Sha’arawi, special invesitgator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, stood gazing through a pair of spectral goggles at the body slumped atop the mammoth divan.

A djinn.

This Novella sounds really intriguing and I think there might be a follow up on the way later this year! Ready to find out what it is?

Egypt, 1912. In an alternate Cairo infused with the otherworldly, the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities investigate disturbances between the mortal and the (possibly) divine. What starts off as an odd suicide case for Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi leads her through the city’s underbelly as she encounters rampaging ghouls, saucy assassins, clockwork angels, and plot that could unravel time itself.