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
Lines
It was an ugly Monday just after noon. There had been no sign of sun so far, just a thick fog that had put the blocks to traffic around the Golden Gate. I was behind the wheel of the squad car, and Inspector Rich Conklin, my partner of many years, was in the seat beside me when Claire called my cell phone.
Claire Washburn is my closest friend, and also San Francisco’s Chief Medical Examiner. This call was strictly business.
“Lindsay,” Claire shouted over the braying of car horns. “I’ve got two DBs in a single-car smash-up and I don’t know what the hell I’m looking at. If you and Richie are in the neighborhood, I could use another opinion.”
She gave me her location, and I told her we’d be there as soon as weather and traffic permitted. I repeated to Rich what Claire had said and turned the car around.
My partner is smart, steady, a glass-full type of guy, and on this particular day, he was pretty happy with himself.
He said, “Claire wants us to look at a traffic fatality?”
And The Book Is…
(Women’s Murder Club #13)
by James Patterson, Maxine Paetro
Alex
