First Lines Fridays – 17th March 2023

Hey everyone!
It is time for this week’s First Lines Fridays post!

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!

The first lines of today’s chosen book are:

I landed at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport on Friday, May 3, 2019, and took a taxi to an address on Spuistraat, in the very center of Amsterdam. A woman from the Dutch Foundation for Literature was there to greet me and show me around the apartment I was to occupy for the next month. I’d come to Amsterdam to write a book about the cold case investigation into who betrayed Anne Frank and the other residents in the secret Annex on August 4, 1944, a mystery that had never been solved.

And the book is…

The Betrayal Of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan

PURCHASE HERE (affiliate link): Amazon UK

GoodReads Synopsis:

Using new technology, recently discovered documents and sophisticated investigative techniques, an international team—led by an obsessed former FBI agent—has finally solved the mystery that has haunted generations since World War II: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why? The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation is the team’s riveting story.

Over thirty million people have read The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal kept by the teenaged Anne Frank while living in an attic with her family in Amsterdam during World War II, until they were sent to their deaths by the Nazis. But despite the many works—journalism, biographies, plays and novels—devoted to Anne’s story, none has conclusively explained how the Franks and four other people managed to hide undetected for over two years, and who or what finally brought the Nazis to their door.

With painstaking care, former FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team of indefatigable investigators pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents—some never before seen—and interviewed scores of descendants of the people involved, both Nazi sympathizers and resisters, who were familiar with the Franks. Utilizing methods developed by the FBI, the cold case team painstakingly pieced together the months leading up to the Franks’ arrest—and came to a shocking conclusion.

Have you read this book?
If yes, what did you think of it?

Let me know in the comments!

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