Welcome to entry #2 for First Lines Fridays! Every week (or whenever the mood strikes), I’ll be sharing the opening line of a book—no title, no author—just the first sentence that sets the whole story in motion.
First Lines Fridays is a weekly post hosted by Wandering Words. In this post instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines.
To do this simply:
- 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!
First line:
“Sometimes, in that split second when Ray Levine snapped a picture and lost the world in the strobe from his flashbulb, he saw the blood.”
Do you recognise what line this book is from?
Okay, here’s a hint for you… it’s a mystery/thriller that was made into a TV show.
Still unsure? Here’s your last hint… it’s written by Harlan Coben.
Keep scrolling down for the BIG REVEAL!
Megan is a suburban soccer mom who once upon a time walked on the wild side. Now she’s got two kids, a perfect husband, a picket fence, and a growing sense of dissatisfaction. Ray used to be a talented documentary photographer, but at age forty he finds himself in a dead-end job posing as a paparazzo pandering to celebrity-obsessed rich kids. Jack is a detective who can’t let go of a cold case—a local husband and father disappeared seventeen years ago, and Jack spends the anniversary every year visiting a house frozen in time, the missing man’s family still waiting, his slippers left by the recliner as if he might show up any moment to step into them.
Three people living lives they never wanted, hiding secrets that even those closest to them would never suspect, will find that the past doesn’t recede. Even as the terrible consequences of long-ago events crash together in the present and threaten to ruin lives, they will come to the startling realization that they may not want to forget the past at all. And as each confronts the dark side of the American Dream—the boredom of a nice suburban life, the excitement of temptation, the desperation and hunger that can lurk behind even the prettiest facades—they will discover the hard truth that the line between one kind of life and another can be as whisper-thin as a heartbeat.
[Did you guess right?]
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