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!

Happy Friday! I have zero plans this weekend and I can’t wait… it will be my first free weekend in I don’t know how long and I’m looking forward to chilling out and getting some reading in. The book I’ve chosen for this week was described as a female John Wick story with dragon magic set in contemporary San Francisco’s Chinatown, which instantly intrigued me, and the first line quickly got it’s hooks in me.

“Midnight in Golden Gate park was mostly quiet, just the distant sounds of city traffic and my grunts of exertion as I dragged the yeti corpse to my Jeep.”

Sounds good right?!? Ready to find out what it is?

Emiko Soong belongs to one of the eight premier magical families of the world. But Emiko never needed any magic. Because she is the Blade of the Soong Clan. Or was. Until she’s drenched in blood in the middle of a market in China, surrounded by bodies and the scent of blood and human waste as a lethal perfume.

The Butcher of Beijing now lives a quiet life in San Francisco, importing antiques. But when a shinigami, a god of death itself, calls in a family blood debt, Emiko must recover the Ebony Gate that holds back the hungry ghosts of the Yomi underworld. Or forfeit her soul as the anchor.

What’s a retired assassin to do but save the City By The Bay from an army of the dead?