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?

• 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!

Hello, & happy weekend! For this weeks post I’ve chosen a recent addition to my ARC tbr. I literally whooped with job when I was accepted for this on Netgalley, and it took all my self control not to dive straight in, especially after reading the first few lines. Set in the aftermath of WW1, this story focuses on a young woman as she gets swept away into a world of romance, magic and murder…

“Rumour had it that Crow Island was haunted by witches.”

See… you’re intrigued right? You want to read more? You’re impressed by my self control that I just didn’t start reading it there and then? Ready to find out what it is?

On Crow Island, people whisper, real magic lurks just below the surface. 

Neither real magic nor faux magic interests Annie Mason. Not after it stole her future. She’s only on the island to settle her late father’s estate and, hopefully, reconnect with her long-absent best friend, Beatrice, who fled their dreary lives for a more glamorous one. 

Yet Crow Island is brimming with temptation, and the biggest one may be her enigmatic new neighbor. 

Mysterious and alluring, Emmeline Delacroix is a figure shadowed by rumours of witchcraft. And when Annie witnesses a confrontation between Bea and Emmeline at one of the island’s extravagant parties, she is drawn into a glittering, haunted world. A world where the boundaries of wickedness are tested, and the cost of illicit magic might be death.