Perhaps not strictly your experience with this scenario in reading, but when watching a movie, or even pondering your own novel, I wondered if anyone felt it unnatural or irregular to begin a story with a cliffhanger? To me, Anime is the most infamous for doing this early on in the telling of the story and I was considering such a plot to open my novel instead of the political scene I had planned on (finding it might fit more nicely later in the book). So generically, do you think an immediate cliffhanger puts you off the story?