First Lines Fridays #31

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

Mason walked along West Pershing Road, South Side Chicago, counting
and recounting the pennies in his pocket. One note; a dollar. Pennies worth
three dollars. He slipped their cool, coppery discs between his fingers,
enjoying the sense of them.
It was quite a haul. He’d sat outside the 47th Street L station with his
good sign for days. Being a veteran was true, and the message on the sign
that he was hungry was true, but people didn’t always help.
You couldn’t blame them. Mason often thought about that as he sat
there, watching them go by. Business people. Tourists. Mothers. He knew
what they saw when they saw him, and he hated preying on their
generosity, but that was life, and it didn’t help to dwell on the negatives.
Wendy told him that, and Wendy was beautiful inside and out.
He passed the bus stop on South State Street and a gang of youths called
out to him. “Hey, privilege, you got cash today?”
They thought that was funny, and who was Mason to argue? He did his
aw shucks grin and shrug. In high school he’d been the teaser, but his time
in the Marines had beaten that out of him, and also left him with shrapnel
in his brain.

Goodreads Blurb:

Hundreds of human cages hidden in the desert. A small-town police department wiped out. One man with nothing to lose.

He goes by Christopher Wren, but that’s not his real name. As a legendary DELTA operator he dismantled terrorist cults, drug cartels and corporate conspiracies all around the world – but what cost him that job was the one thing he didn’t tell his CIA bosses.

While taking dangerous organizations apart for Uncle Sam, Wren was building his own on the side – a vigilante army of ex-cons, hackers and disgraced marines set to come to his aid at a moment’s notice.

He’s going to need them now.

Saint Justice launches the Christopher Wren thriller series with explosive originality, perfect for fans of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, Mark Dawson’s John Milton and Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp.

Alex