Highest Rated in Our Group This Year

Our Mystery Book Club -the one that meets in the town Library- uses a score sheet to "rate" or "grade" the books we read each month. You can download a copy from the link on the right. Anyway, this month's selection was Run Before the Wind by Stuart Woods. The book was placed on the schedule because we had such a collectively high regard for Chiefs, Woods' first book, when we read it last year (my review). Like last year, this book was rated very high by everyone - the average score was 94 ! Eight of nine people rated it 90 or above.

Run Before the Wind picks up in the early 1970s with the next generation of the Lee family in Georgia. Young Will Lee is an unfocused law school student who finds himself forced to take a year off. He sets out to travel around Europe, but a chance act of daring in which he rescues a yacht adrift in a harbor, changes everything. He accepts a proposal to help build a competitive sailing yacht in a small Irish village alongside a former British marine and his wife. It happens that the Brit is targeted by IRA extremists, and Will finds himself caught up in the cross hairs.

Many in our group loved the nautical scenes and descriptions: boat building, sailing, harborside activities, and so on.

Others were fascinated by the issues of ideological extremists in general and Irish nationalists in particular: how can people get so caught up in their view of life that they would kill the people they are defending ... to defend them?

We all felt the book was a page turner aided by extremely good writing: new elements of plot, lots of foreshadowing, excellent characterizations throughout the book.

Quite a few said it was the best book they had read all year. NOTE: see our list at bottom of this post. But two of us like Chiefs better than this second book.

I was the only one giving an under-90 rating, namely 87. Still nothing to sneeze at. (My avergae of 11 books was 81.)

My problems with the book: 1) Some unrealistic scenes / or scenes that didn't really make sense: **SPOILER** Example, when the "Bishop" tries to kill the "Nun" in the trailer, why did he wait until then? It made no sense, especially since he opposed the Nun's desire to kill Lee all along anyway. 2) A lot of questions about characters left up in the air, especially the millionaire Thresher. 3) A central character (Lee) with whom I did not identify as well as I did two of the chiefs in Chiefs.

Interesting observation though, several participants who do not like the Stone Barrington character (a PI featured in a number of Woods' later books), felt drawn to Will Lee as someone who learned and matured. Well, I hope so. In the continuing Lee family saga, Will runs for President of the US.

=======

Books read during the last 11 months listed in the order of how I personally rated them:

Hold Tight - Coben - 95
Undue Influence - Martini - 93
Brass Verdict - Connelly - 90
Winter Prey - Sandford - 89
Indemnity Only - Paretsky - 88
Run Before the Wind - Woods - 87
The Shape Shifter - Hillerman - 87
Power Play - Finder - 85
Christine Falls - Black - 76
Skin Deep - Braver - 54
Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders - Mortimer - 45

Why the titles for the first six selections??

First of all: I am not pushing any author or book. Period. If I ever get around to writing/publishing something (LOL), I might push that.

These first titles happen to be the ones my (non-virtual) library book club chose to read. (Alluded to in my "welcome" post.) I will be sharing comments about the book from the library discussion group each month. Of course, that will be after the due date for each book.

So why did the library book club choose these books for this year (Sep 07 - Aug 08)? Well, last year, the group deliberately selected books by New England authors. No one in our group had pre-read the books we chose; they simply represented a good assortment of local scenes. Some authors had many books to their credit; some new writers had very few. As the year progressed, we read a number of books that our group absolutely did not enjoy. Although we had hilarious fun pillorying these books, even using them as a helpful measurement of what we did not like, we just did not have much fun with the actual reading of some of these books.

So our group thought we might increase our odds by reading award winning books. Even that is no guarantee. We recently read New England author Thomas Cook's book, The Chatham School Affair, which won the 1997 Edgar Award for best novel. Boy did our group differ in reaction to that book! Several of us REALLY like the book (myself included); others seriously did NOT like the book at all. Our group is well aware that movie-goers often disagree with movie critics, and that may be our experience with Award Winning mystery books. Nevertheless, for this year we have left the local authors theme and gone to the Award Winners theme.

The first six books represent a variety of genres and authors. The awards are not all from the same source (organizations giving awards have their biases too!).

Here are the books and the related awards:

The Lincoln Lawyer (Connelly) - 2006 Macavity Best Novel; 2006 Shamus Best Novel, 2006 Edgar Finalist for Best Novel; 2006 Anthony Finalist for Best Novel.

The James Deans (Coleman) - 2006 Anthony for Best Paperback; 2006 Shamus for Best PI Paperback; 2006 Edgar Finalist for Best Paperback; 2006 Macavity Finalist for Best Novel.

California Girl (Parker) - 2005 Edgar Finalist for Best Novel.

The Virgin of Small Plains (Pickard) - 2007 Finalist for FOUR Awards: Edgar Best Mystery Novel, Agatha Best Novel, Macavity Best Novel, Anthony Best Mystery Novel. Not Part of a Series. (Author has written 16 other novels, divided into 3 series. She has won 3 other Agatha Awards.)

Paranoia (Finder) - Actually it was his book Killer Instinct that won the 2007 Thrillerwriter Award for Best Novel.

Devil in A Blue Dress (Moseley) - Actually he won the Shamus Award for Cinnamon Kiss, the most recent in the series with the Easy Rawlins character. However Devil in a Blue Dress was the first in the series (also made into a movie) and quite good. (Yep I have read most of these.)

The Janissary Tree (Goodwin) - 2007 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel, Finalist 2007 Macavity Award for Best Novel