The October List by Jeffery Deaver
- Ali Mark
- Feb 29, 2016
- 4 min read
Story Line - GREAT - 5
Writing Style - UNIQUE/GREAT - 5
Characters - GOOD - 4
Excitement Factor - GOOD - 4
Believability for type and topics - GOOD - 4.5
Similarity to other books - VERY UNIQUE - 5
Cover art/dust jacket Art - GOOD - 4
Title Relevance - DEAD ON - 5
Goodreads users gave this book a 3.43. I think it was more deserving of a 4.61.
Published in August 2014.
Pages: 303.
Number of books by author: 111.
Genre: Fiction.
When Gabriella's daughter Sarah goes missing, she finds herself teamed up with a love interest from the bar the night before. But when the police are on to Gabriella & Daniel, will a deeper story unveil itself?
You may like this book if you like the following sub-genres:
Mystery/Suspense
Crime
Police/Detective/FBI
Kidnapping & Ransom
This book had me going from page one - and it's because of the way it's written. We start at chapter 31, and work our way back to the beginning of the story. I've never seen this done this way, so at first, I was skeptical. But it occurred to me that this book wouldn't have been as amazing as it was if it hadn't been written the way it was. I hadn't read a J. Deaver book prior, but I had heard through the grape vine that his work was always very good. (Which is surprising since he's written 111 books.) My gut instinct was to assign this 5 stars, and I would've, but I was "disappointed" with two areas of the book (and I use that word very lightly since the lowest score was a 4). And it was such an easy read. I was really surprised when the book only took about 4 hours to read - and it's not incredibly long, but usually when you have as many characters as we saw (and I didn't count all of them, but I did count 12... and there's at least 5 more random names thrown in there), you expect it to be heavily detailed and drowning in description, but we didn't see that so it was a little easier to move through it... and a self-propelling story line doesn't hurt, either.
The characters in this book felt too good to be true. And they kind of were... until you realize what you're reading, and then you're like, HOLYSHIT, that's amazing! Something I always want to see in my characters is descriptions and growth (or regression if that's necessary). These characters were very basic, John Doe and Jane Doe characters. I didn't feel as if any one thing was duplicated about them, but I didn't find anything unique about them either. Their (lack of?) predictibility is still sitting with me because I didn't realize what was happening until it was already happening, and that says a lot about the writing style paired with the characters themselves. How an author writes in a
character can really be telling of how we feel about a character. I didn't hate anyone, but I came close. I certainly didn't love anyone either, and I think that was the biggest problem. I should've felt sympathetic for Gabriella at times (and maybe I should've hated her at times, too); but I didn't. And maybe that was Deaver's intention, was to strip us of our sympathies, but I kind of wish there was a little more emotion behind the intentions of Gabriella's character. The growth/change in a few characters was there, but it wasn't really noticable until the end.
Now when I said the characters felt too good to be true; the story felt that way, too. It was too easy. It was so believable, you had to realize that something was off. It's good detective work to feel that way. But because it felt that way, I was able to start picking through the evidence, if that's what we can call it, to try to figure out who's doing what with whom and why. (Which, again, I didn't figure out until the VERY end of the book.) It was really done well. I saw an episode of Criminal Minds or Law & Order SVU playing out in book form. It was really just a great detective/police work story. If it hadn't been for a few patchy spaces where the book seemed to get off track, I think I would've been able to add in another 5, which would've brought it to a 4.70 with the cover art and title, and a 4.69 without the art - leading it almost straight into 5-star territory.
The title is self-explanatory, really. There's a million other things that could've been the title for this book, and I'm just glad the author didn't try to pull a fast one over on the audience. (In other words, it gets a five for hitting the nail on the head.) The art was a bit strange to me - there was text on the cover, in a very faded grey with a few words in red, and they were backwards... so I'm not sure if that was symbollic of the story being told from end to finish; or if there was supposed to be something that we should've been able to read? I'm not entirely sure. The clock there was just fine - and will make sense when you get to the point where the clock makes sense. (Cryptic much?) But overall, I didn't feel anything from the art - I mean, maybe I did and that's why I picked it. Or maybe because my favorite month is October - I felt connected in some way or another.
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