It’s time for another adventure in Kate’s 6 Degrees of Separation Meme from her blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best. We are given a book to start with, and from there we free associate six books.
I haven’t yet read this month’s starter book, Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife, although I certainly do intend to. The book describes an attack by a knife-wielding man as Rushdie was about to begin speaking at a literary event.
first degree
Lucky by Alice Sebold is another memoir about a personal attack: Sebold’s rape at the end of her freshman year in college.
second degree
After Lucky, Alice Sebold published The Lovely Bones, a novel about the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl. The protagonist, Susie Salmon, narrates the book from her own personal heaven as she observes how her family and community react to and recover from her death.
third degree
Another novel in which the ghost of a murder victim hovers over the world she was taken from is Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman.
fourth degree
In The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager, the main character, now an adult, investigates the disappearance of three camp cabinmates 15 years earlier, when she was an adolescent. To revisit the site of the disappearance, she has to paddle a canoe across a lake to the site she thinks the other three were headed toward.
fifth degree
The disappearance of adolescent girls is a common trope in crime fiction. Three girls also vanish from a group in Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay.
sixth degree
The ominous opening lines of Daphne du Maurier’s novel My Cousin Rachel pick up the image of hanging: “They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not anymore, though.”
With this image, we have traveled from several crimes, both real and imagined, to a warning about what has historically happened to perpetrators who got caught.
Where did your 6 Degrees of Separation journey take you this month?
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
This is a very nice chain. I thank you for reminding me of The Lovely Bones, which has been hiding one my TBR for many years. Also, Lady in the Lake by Lippman. I was worried that would be too tense for me but I read your review and it convinced me that I would like it.
I want to read more by du Maurier but I don’t have a copy of My Cousin Rachel yet.
TracyK at Bitter Tea and Mystery
Oh, such a dark chain, but well done!