The Friday 56 (With Book Beginnings): Marked for Judgment by Jared McCann + 50/50 Friday

Welcome to The Friday 56, a weekly meme hosted by Freda's Voice.

These are the rules:

1. Grab a book, any book.

2. Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader.
3. Find any sentence (or a few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you.
4. Post it.
5. Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda's most recent Friday 56 post.

I'm also taking part in Book Beginnings, a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader.  The rules are pretty simple - you share the first sentence or so and your initial thoughts, impressions, or whatever else it inspires.  Don't forget to link up your post's url with Rose City Reader.

This week I'm spotlighting one of my upcoming reads, Marked for Judgment by Jared McCann.  I'm reading this book for Book Riot's 2017 Read Harder Challenge - it fulfills task ten which is to read a book set within 100 miles of your location.  Yeah, this 2016 Christian thriller is set practically in my own back yard and the author is a local man.  I'm definitely interested to see how he presents the area - seriously, just seeing Mount Vernon and Knox County appear in a book is giving me chills!

Beginning:

Elijah Jennings sat in an unmarked county Ford Explorer reading up on the Mount Vernon Daily while he staked out the drug house they had been eyeing for three months now.  The early morning sky, for now, was cloudless and bright with the radiance of the stars.  The brilliance of the light shone down just as stage lights illuminate a performer.  July in Mount Vernon, this year, invited warm, but not too humid of nights with an array of stars protruding from a black sky..

56:

Elijah sat outside for a while longer.  Around him, fireflies illuminated their cold light, and he listened to the night as crickets chirped their evening song.  He thought about tomorrow and suddenly remembered that he would be commemorating seven years since his father's death.

This week I'm also taking part in a linkup called 50/50 Friday, which is hosted by Carrie @ The Butterfly Reader and Laura @ Blue Eye Books.  Every week they'll have a new topic featuring two sides of the same coin - this week the topic is Best/ Worst Book You Read In April.

Best: 

I had five five star reads in April - American Agent by Melvin Purvis, Half Lost by Sally Green, The Midnight Star by Marie Lu, The Gauntlet by Karuna Riazi, and Saga, Volume 7 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples - and while all of them are excellent - I have to give Melvin Purvis's 1936 memoir/ history of the FBI the credit as easily being the most fascinating thing I've read all month!

Worst:

Empress of a Thousand Skies by Rhoda Belleza - This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, but unfortunately I ended up DNF'ing it at 1/8 of the way through the audiobook.  Unfortunately, I just couldn't get into it.