
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!
Today’s First Lines:
The man had disappeared from an isolated platform; the furthest platform eastward, in fact, on the 4°63′ line, never a very popular ring. It took Mossa five hours on the railcar to get there, alone because none of her Investigator colleagues were available, or eager, to take such a long trip for what would almost certainly be confirmation of a suicide.
Do you know which book this is from? Scroll down to find out!




Title: The Mimicking of Known Successes
Author: Malka Older
Publication Date: March 7, 2023
Goodreads Synopsis
The Mimicking of Known Successes presents a cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter, by Malka Older, author of the critically-acclaimed Centenal Cycle.
On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university—and Mossa’s former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems.
Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti’s assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake—and, perhaps, their futures, together.