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!
Got it? Okay let’s go! Here is the quote…
“A bullet slams into the facade of the building next to me, narrowly missing my head.”
Do you know this one?
It’s the next book in a fun thriller series…
It is about reformed hitmen…
Have you guessed?
Yes? No?
Give up?
Here it is!
Three Hitmen and a Baby
Summary from Goodreads:
Welcome back to Assassins Anonymous, where family is everything and danger lurks around every corner.
Assassins Anonymous isn’t just a weekly recovery meeting for reformed killers—it’s also a family.
When Valencia receives troubling news that her brother has gone missing, she wants rush off to LA to find him. But she can’t bring her baby girl, Lucia. Enter the other members of Assassins Anonymous—Mark, Astrid, and Booker, who offer to watch the toddler while she’s gone. After all, they’re three of the deadliest, most highly skilled people on the planet; what could go wrong?
Turns out, a lot. Shortly after Valencia leaves, Mark is summoned to the lair of Zmeya, a Russian mob boss calling in a deadly favor—she wants him to kill Astrid, his protege and friend. Mark refuses, but Zmeya reveals that she knows the identity of Mark’s ex-girlfriend . . . and his son. Either Astrid goes, or they do.
Meanwhile, Lucia spikes a dangerously high fever, and when Booker and Astrid take her to urgent care, they realize too late, that their fabricated identities are a real liability. Also, they don’t know Valencia’s last name, let alone Lucia’s. They can hardly blame the staff for calling the NYPD.
Suddenly the splintered group is on the run from both the Russian mob and the police, dodging bad guys and do-gooders while trying to find refuge in a city full of surveillance cameras—all without killing anyone. That is, until Zmeya captures Sara and Bennett, and Mark is ready to throw his sobriety out the window.
This is a really fun series about a group of reformed hitmen just trying to get live their lives and not kill anyone. I loved the AA type support group they have and all of the found family vibes.
What do you think? Have you heard about this book or the series? Is it on your TBR? Let me know in the comments.
Until next time…
Confessions of a Serial Reader 