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!

Back to my regularly scheduled highlighting of backlist titles I need to get too. This book seems to constantly be talked about on book twitter and the author is ridiculously nice and interactive.

“I don’t need to dissect the bird to know how it died. I watched it fly straight into the mast moments ago, it’s limp body falling to the deck, its fragmented skull rattling between my fingers as I picked it up. But it’s death isn’t what interests me, I want to know how it lived.”

Well I don’t know about you but I’m certainly intrigued! Ready to find out what it is?

Seventeen-year-old Marianne is fated to one day become the Viper, defender of the Twelve Isles.

But the reigning Viper stands in her way. Corrupt and merciless, he prowls the seas in his warship, killing with impunity, leaving only pain and suffering in his wake.

He’s the most dangerous man on the ocean . . . and he is Marianne’s father.

She was born to protect the islands. But can she fight for them if it means losing her family, her home, the boy she loves – and perhaps even her life?