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Winter comes to water as well as land, though there are no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque, and cold. If you are a boy not wanted in the house you walk the beach for hours, feeling the winter that has come in the night; sand blowing across your shoes, spray wetting the legs of your corduroys. You turn your back to the sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half buried write in the wet sand Tackman Babcock.

Then you go home, knowing that behind you the Atlantic is destroying your work.

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I just started Mistborn 1: The Well of Ascension. So far, it's pretty good, but so far it's not as good as Volume 1.

UPDATE Oops! Misread it and thought it said "books."

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Christmas morning I wake early, shivering by the dead fire, and go out dragging my feet through oil-blackened sand down the long-deserted beach of Cold Harbor. A chill breeze blows steadily over the sea, carrying gull cries and the faint smell of rot. Along the beach between weedy clumps of marshgrass, dead horseshoe crabs and small misshapen fish lie abandoned by the tides. Here and there are mucid gray globs of something vaguely organic, as if the sea is heaving up clotted bits of itself in an agony of decay. Enduring this walk seems a kind of obligation for me. There are no other people about on this holiday morning; scarcely other living things at all.
At last I come home to the box. My coffin-shaped Christmas present. Which for a week has lain unopened in this gray-

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It was always messy, cleaning up after a murder. There was more than just blood to be washed off the tiles. There were all those awkward loose ends to be taken care of-alibis to be established, traitors to be paid off, witnesses to be silenced…

And that, Elezaar knew, was the problem. He’d just witnessed a murder.

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The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
-Stephen King (The Gunslinger)

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Any time the subject of best first lines comes up, that quote always gets mentioned. And for good reason - there's a SOLID hook in that first sentence.

But notwithstanding that first sentence, the next paragraph goes on to describe the desert! Could you imagine somebody posting 13 lines here on Hatrack that described a desert? It'd be skewered for being too dry (!) reading and a poor way to open a story and there should be more conflict and...
Yes, I know... it's Stephen freakin' King

As for awesome hooks, I don't remember how or why I picked up Douglas Adams. It was a long time ago, and I didn't know anything of the goodness that was Hitchhikers. But after reading this opening:

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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
The planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper...

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