Teaser Tuesdays -- The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme hosted by MizB @ Should Be Reading. To participate, all you have to do is the following:

• Grab your current/upcoming read
• Open to a random page
• Share 2-3 "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page
• Be careful not to include spoilers!  

But if the barrel could not contain the force of the explosion, she would lose her right arm.

She tilted a quantity of the black, gritty powder into the barrel and tamped it down firmly.  Then she tore off a little square of blue cloth from the hem of the dress Rosa had been altering, and wrapped it around one of the balls of lead to ensure a snug fit; and then the ball joined the powder in the barrel, and a patch of wadding followed it. 

 

~page 160, The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman 

This is my current read with my daughter.  It's pretty non-stop suspense and this is the beginning of a series (by the author of the His Dark Materials series) so we'll be reading about Sally Lockhart for a while!