Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I'm no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I'm back with another post.
For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply "share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight."
MY BOOK BEGINNING
Christmas Day, January 6, 1888
The elderly publisher put on his spectacles to examine the enameled pin in his hand. It displayed a symbol of broken chains draped across a sword, an ax, and a red flag. He handed the pin back to the young woman as if it were poison.
Last week I featured George Clark's 1962 Early Modern Europe: From About 1450 to About 1720. The week before it was Barbara F. Walter's 2022 How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. This week it's Jenny White's 2010 historical thriller The Winter Thief.
It's only the first week of July and I'm already deviating from my original 20 Books of Summer. After reading Chris Bohjalian's The Sandcastle Girls I was in the mood for more historical fiction involving Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. The Winter Thief was seemed like a logical choice. (You might have noticed in the opening passage Christmas is referred to as January 6. This is consistent with Armenian tradition.) Fortunately, I can apply this work of historical fiction towards a number of other challenges like Rose City 
Reader's European Reading and Book by Book's Big Book Summer Challenge. The Winter Thief is the concluding novel of White's Kamil Pasha trilogy, which includes The Sultan's Seal and The Abyssinian Proof. Here's what Amazon has to say about White's The Winter Thief.
January 1888. Vera Arti carries The Communist Manifesto in Armenian through Istanbul's streets, unaware of the men following her. When the police discover a shipload of guns and the Imperial Ottoman Bank is blown up, suspicion falls on a socialist commune Arti's friends organized in the eastern mountains. Special Prosecutor Kamil Pasha is called in to investigate. He soon encounters his most ruthless adversary to date: Vahid, head of a special branch of the secret police, who has convinced the sultan that the commune is leading a secessionist movement and should be destroyed―along with surrounding villages. Kamil must stop the massacre, but he finds himself on the wrong side of the law, framed for murder and accused of treason, his family and the woman he loves threatened.
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