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!
And here’s the line.
My prey, a five-foot-ten Caucasian male, ordered a double shot mocha as he tapped his pointer finger on the counter.
I like this line for all the questions it raises. Who’s the man? Why is he prey? Who is the narrator, and why is she hunting him?
Scroll down for more.
My prey, a five-foot-ten Caucasian male, ordered a double shot mocha as he tapped his pointer finger on the counter. I eyed him from a little round table near the door. His faint scent of nervous sweat called to me.
I preferred the scent of fear wafting from my prey, but nervousness would have to do. Fear would soon join the mix. It was only a matter of time.
Ominous! Does anyone recognize this opening?
It’s from Freyja’s Daughter by Rachel Sullivan.
Well behaved women seldom make history, but they still end up as the monsters in folklore.
Faline Frey is a bounty-hunter, more comfortable relying on perp files and handcuffs than using her huldra powers to take down a suspect. No sense in catching the unwanted attention of her local Hunter authority, a group of holy soldiers born to police the supernatural and keep Wild Women—huldras, mermaids, succubae, rusalki and harpies—in check.
All that changes the night she heads out for a date, hoping to get lucky. Instead, she gets screwed.
Now her sister is missing, along with Wild Women from all over the country. The Hunters are on her tail and the one person offering to help is her ex-lover, Officer David Garcia, who has just enough ties to the supernatural world to hang her with. To unite her enemies against their common foe, Faline will need to convince the Wild Women to do the one thing she fears most—exhume their power buried deep beneath centuries of oppression. That is, if she can keep them from killing each other.
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Anybody else read this one? What do you think of the first line? Share your thoughts in the comments.
The Shadow Journals 