First Chapter ~ First Paragraph ~ Tuesday Intros

Every Tuesday, I'll be posting the opening paragraph (maybe two) of a book I decided to read based on the opening paragraph (s). Feel free to grab the banner and play along.

This week's selection was released last week:

Those Across the River

ACE Books, New York

(The first page of the first chapter is mostly short dialogue, so I'm posting the first paragraph of the intro)

"He came out to see me in the cage because I belonged to him. I was like a new racehorse he still found interesting enough to visit at night, when the others were asleep. He sat there cross-legged on the wet ground, unmindful of the light rain which was falling on him.  It wasn't enough to extinguish his cigar, but it was enough to keep my ruined back waterlogged; enough to make me think my bones were made of cold pewter."

"I had drifted in and out. He might have been there an hour before I noticed him."

 "You're going to die out here, he said."

"He didn't say it to frighten me."

"He just said it."

  Does this opening draw you in?

(me, yes - just enough of the creep factor)

(Here's an overview in case you are interested)

Failed academic Frank Nichols and his wife, Eudora, have arrived in the sleepy Georgia town of Whitbrow, where Frank hopes to write a history of his family's old estate-the Savoyard Plantation- and the horrors that occurred there. At first, the quaint, rural ways of their new neighbors seem to be everything they wanted. But there is an unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with for generations. A presence that demands sacrifice.

It comes from the shadowy woods across the river, where the ruins of Savoyard still stand. Where a longstanding debt of blood has never been forgotten.

A debt that has been waiting patiently for Frank Nichols's homecoming...