Saturday Slaughters ...

... is the name of the crime reading book group at the library which alert readers may recall I sort of joined when my doctorate was finished and I was looking to get my life back and do the stuff that normal people do. I was in  two minds about going, but I thought it might be fun and extend my knowledge of crime fiction so  along I went. I have to say it has not been a great success and I'm not sure that I will keep going. 

To start with the first person I met on the first occasion I went was someone who is notorious as one of the rudest people in Orkney. She doesn't come often, which cuts down her opportunities to tell me that I am fat. She did this once years ago when I tried out a group that did circle dancing. I never went back. It's not that it wasn't true. But who says that straight to someone's face when they have never seen them before in their lives? And lest you get the wrong impression and start to think Orcadian are rude, this person is an in-comer. In fact it was so long since she had inveigled herself onto the pages of the local rag that I had thought that she had left. Obviously I was wrong. 

Then again the discussion tends to go off track. I appreciate this is probably something all book groups suffer from. A random group of people vaguely interested in a wide raging genre of fiction (or even non-fiction I suppose) won't necessarily have much in common, even as regards how they read and react to books. But I don't go to talk about TV adaptations, many of which are awful (imo), or real life cases or indeed, remembering with a shudder the last time I attended, the new street lights in Kirkwall. The new street lights in Kirkwall came in for a lot of attention the last time I was present, more indeed than the book (supposedly) under  discussion.

No the real off-putter is, sadly enough, the books themselves. There was a Rebus (not generally a fan) and a Val MacDermid (not generally a fan). There was quite a good one set in Australia that I enjoyed, and an absolutely dire one set in Russia that I didn't. There was a Martin Beck that I didn't finish because I really didn't care who had committed either of the crimes under investigation, and a book by a local author which I didn't even try to read because I wasn't going to be at the meeting. 

I thought I wasn't going to be at this month's either as we are off south shortly, but it is this Saturday, not next which means I can go and so I dutifully tried this months book. . It was Past Tense by Lee Child and had 'A Jack Reacher Novel' emblazoned all over the front cover. Now I have heard of Lee Child and I have even heard of Jack Reacher, and my sister is a big fan but I have never previously read one because I am not a fan of the thriller. My preference is for police procedurals, and British ones at that. Narrow I know, which is partly why I went off to the group in the first place of course. Anyway, the JR books are very successful and can sales of 100 million be achieved by books that are no good? 

Well I tried. I tried very hard. Then I gave up at about chapter 5. Because really there was one very uninteresting storyline, and one very stupid storyline and a lot of not very nice people and I thought Life is Too Short and sent the book back. Out of curiosity I went and looked at the Amazon reviews for this book and they are a long long tale of disappointment and annoyance. I gather that even by hard core Reacher fans this book was not well received. So I felt vindicated, and even more so when the librarian who leads the group but who will be away this month sent round his feelings about it and they were much the same as mine. I'm a bit sad about it really, because if it had been a better example of Child's writing, I might have discovered a new author that I enjoyed. But rather like being called fat when you take up dancing to try and lose some weight, trying a bad example of a generally good thing first, is off putting.