Don’t spoil it for me.
…but, I’m guessing the protagonist comes back?
Abandonned. I seem to remember absolutely loving this book back in the day, but now I find it just about unreadable. 
New first sentence: “Forty-one years after I died, my friend Dale returned to the farm where I was murdered.” A Winter Haunting, by Dan Simmons
“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.”
-The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
“In the morning they gave Reacher a medal, and in the afternoon they sent him back to school.”
Should be an easy one to guess.
A short story:
“Bob Wilson did not see the circle grow”
"If you look as satellite photographs of the far east by night, you’ll see a large splotch
curiously lacking in light. "
from “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” by Barbara Demik.
“Stephen Whitler Fox could not remember when he had first realized he was going to run for president.”
from Act of Darkness a Gregor Demarkian Mystery, by Jane Haddam.
“The boat moved with a nauseous, relentless rhythm, like someone chewing on a rotten tooth.”
The Lie Tree, by Frances Hardinge
Here at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute, we’re suckers for cool facts, and we’re constantly quizzing each other.
_Uncle John’s Rathroom Reader “Wise Up!”
Ugh. Vivid.
Nice. Seems to work pretty well for several of them. Now I wish I had posted the little “teaser” that is before the first sentence of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
Although then the appending of “and then the murders began” might even be a step down.
“For sixty-five days, the Mayflower had blundered her way through storms and headwinds, her bottom a saggy pelt of seaweed and barnacles, her leaky decks spewing saltwater onto her passengers’ devoted heads.”
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
by Nathaniel Philbrick
© 2006 by Nathaniel Philbrick
Highly recommended to all you history buffs out there.
“Even though feeling like a drama queen sucked donkey’s balls, it was still true – leaving Dragos and New York behind was one of the hardest things Pia had ever done.”
Lord’s Fall, Thea Harrison
This time there would be no witnesses.
“Virgil Earp was determined to sleep in on Wednesday, October 26, 1881.”
The Last Gunfight– Jeff Guinn
“Deep in Honduras, in a region called La Mosquitia, lie some of the last unexplored places on earth.”
- The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston
“Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered.”
– The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon
“At dusk they pour from the sky.”
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
“It was a dark and stormy night…”
No, really. That’s the first sentence.
“The following pages are a compilation transcribed from petabytes of analyzed text, audio, and video recovered from Hub sensor Big Iron.”
Tomorrow War by J.L. Bourne