Teaser Tuesday – 15th October, 2019 #Brainfluffbookblog #TeaserTuesday

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by The Purple Booker.
Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This is my choice of the day:

Empire Games – Book 1 of the Empire Games series by Charles Stross
p. 123 Two months after her abortive kidnapping, Rita was allowed a weekend trip home to visit her family. In fact, she was urged to do so. “E-mail and Facebook aren’t enough,” explained her supervisor, an affable African American named Patrick O-Neill who’d worked surveillance operations when he was in the FBI. “If you vanish off the face of the earth for weeks, then send them vaguely reassuring messages, your parents will worry that you’ve been abducted; it’s entirely natural. But you’ve been through basic orientation and briefing now, and it’ll make life a lot easier for us – and for them – if you go home and explain what’s happened.”

“Easier for you?” Rita asked dubiously.

BLURB: The year is 2020. It’s seventeen years since the Revolution overthrew the last king of the New British Empire, and the newly-reconstituted North American Commonwealth is developing rapidly, on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world. Two nuclear superpowers are set on a collision course. Two increasingly desperate paratime espionage agencies are fumbling around in the dark, trying to find a solution to the first contact problem that doesn’t result in a nuclear holocaust. And two women—a mother and her long-lost, adopted daughter—are about to find themselves on opposite sides of the confrontation.
I’ve performed major surgery on the blurb, which reads more like a mini-synopsis and the names won’t mean anything to you, anyway.

This is the first book in a spinoff series from Stross’s rightly successful Merchant Princes portal fantasy thriller, which deals with a measure of rigour and intelligence to the premise – what if there were parallel worlds that a few people could access? I had an unfortunate attempt to read this book back in 2017 – see here. But now I have managed to get hold of it in my local library and am enjoying it.