We all know we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover (yet, publishing companies spend big bucks on cover design/art). But, the opening sentence(s)/paragraph(s) are fair game. So, when I stumble on a good opening (or remember one and pull it off the shelves), I like to throw it up here.
I’m going to do something a little different with this one–Broken by Don Winslow is a collection of novellas. Each one has a different voice, a different feel, a different kind of crime. Today, to give a little taste of the diversity, I want to share the opening of two of the novellas, each one grabbed me in their own way.
from Broken:
You ain’t gotta tell Eva the world is a broken place.
A 911 dispatcher on a New Orleans night shift, Eva McNabb hears humanity’s brokenness for eight hours straight, five nights a week, more when she’s pulling doubles. She hears the car accidents, the robberies, the shootings, the murders, the maimings, the deaths. She hears the fear, the panic, the anger, the rage, the chaos, and she sends men racing toward it.
Well, mostly men—there are more and more women on the force—but Eva thinks of all of them as her “guys,” her “boys.” She sends them into all that brokenness and then prays they come back in one piece.
Mostly they do, sometimes they don’t, and then she’s sending more of her guys, her boys, into the broken places.
Literally, sometimes, because her husband was a cop and now her two grown sons are cops.
So she knows that life.
She knows that world.
Eva knows that you can come out of it, but you always come out broken.
from The San Diego Zoo:
No one knows how the chimp got the revolver.
Only that it’s a problem.
Chris Shea didn’t think it was his problem, though, when the call first came over the radio that a chimpanzee had escaped from the world-famous San Diego Zoo.
“Call Animal Control,” he responded, not considering runaway monkeys to be a police matter.
Then the dispatcher added, “Uhh, the chimp appears to be armed.”
“Armed?” Chris asked. “With what, like a stick?”
He’d seen something on Animal Planet about chimps using sticks as tools or weapons, which apparently was significant for some reason Chris missed because he got up to make a sandwich.
Or maybe it was baboons.
Or maybe it was the National Geographic Channel.
“Witnesses are reporting that the chimp is carrying a pistol,” the dispatcher said.
Well, Chris hadn’t seen that on Animal Planet.
