The October List

May is Mystery Month for Books & Beer Club. After quickly picking last month's romance book, a little more time was spent selecting our mystery. I wish I could remember the three final choices. One was a classic, written in the 1880s, supposedly the first in it's genre. I totally can't remember what the second one was. And The October List by Jeffery Deaver was the third. We did a vote and The October List won.

I liked the sound of the synopsis on goodreads.com.

Gabriela waits desperately for news of her abducted daughter.
At last, the door opens.
But it's not the negotiators. It's not the FBI.
It's the kidnapper.
And he has a gun.

How did it come to this?

Two days ago, Gabriela's life was normal. Then, out of the blue, she gets word that her six-year-old daughter has been taken. She's given an ultimatum: pay half a million dollars and find a mysterious document known as the "October List" within 30 hours, or she'll never see her child again.

A mind-bending novel with twists and turns that unfold from its dramatic climax back to its surprising beginning, THE OCTOBER LIST is Jeffery Deaver at his masterful, inventive best.

I was most intrigued by the fact that the book works backwards. And that turned out to be what I most enjoyed about The October List. I felt like I had to pay a little bit more attention to what was going on so I'd be able to follow the sequence of events going back in time. I will admit to being very surprised when I opened the e-book on my iPad and Chapter 36. Hmm, did I not get the entire book? Then I realized that the chapter numbers were even in reverse.

Climax after climax occurs, but we don't know what led to each individual climax. Each chapter starts... and ends... with a sort of cliffhanger. I wanted to know How did we get here? more than once, rather than the more normal, Where is this author taking this next? It made for a quick read, although it did require a bit of rereading when I'd put the book down for a few hours and then pick it up and need to remember what I'd been wondering about. Different time of continuity problem for me.

The main character, Gabriela, is a photographer. So each chapter, even in the e-book, shows a photograph that is somehow related to the chapter. I didn't catch on to that until I was up to Chapter 10 or 9... but once I did, I went back to see how each photograph related to the chapter that followed. That was very clever.

Did I like the book? No, not really. I liked the clever way it was written from ending to beginning. But crime thriller really isn't my genre. About three quarters of the way through the book, I had an idea of how the story might have begun. I wasn't exactly correct, but I was definitely on the right track. I also realized at that point that I really didn't like the characters much at all. But on the other hand, it made me really determined to finish the book and learn what set this story in motion.

Since this isn't a genre I usually read but it is the genre of my author friend, Ronnie Allen, I was able to gain a better appreciation of the way Ronnie develops her characters and weaves subplots throughout. My b rain just doesn't think that way - not forward and certainly not in reverse!

When I finished the book, I thought, yay! I have a week and a half with no book club title pending. I can read whatever I'd like for the next 10 days. What was I thinking? Community book club is this Tuesday. That gives me three days to read a book that has nothing to do with book club - and isn't part of the Outlander series. I guess I'll see what's available from the library and take it from there.