2014.05.19 Meeting Notes

We met on Monday to discuss The Shadow Tracer by Meg Gardiner. I lead the discussion since Kerry was and still is on vacation. Janine and Bruce are in South Africa and Raj is in Italy. We are turning into an international traveling group! Since I forgot to get the name tags from Kerry, we were all tagless but not nameless!! Amy brought in WARM German Chocolate Brownies that were amazing. There is just something about warm, gooey chocolate that just can’t be beat. Terrific choice Amy! As she said, “when in doubt, bring chocolate.”
For such a nice, entertaining, “popcorn book” as Dave says, The Shadow Tracer received high marks from this group. We had a single vote of 5, 3 9’s and the majority, 15 of us, gave it a 7 or 8. That seems to be our norm here lately as last month we gave the book 7-8 as well.
Jeff and Lorraine enjoyed the action, tension and sense of urgency in the book. Rita thought it would be great fun to be a skip tracer. Both Chris and Judy had read the book again but reread it with us this time and gave it high marks. To Pat, the book was written to get a movie right/deal with all of the action. Both of us Sharons did not enjoy the whole airplane graveyard ending which was 30 pages long. In fact, both of us could not picture the ups, downs, cutting the plane etc but just read on! I personally knew Zoe was going to live so just wanted to end the story. Denise thought there could be a sequel in the making with Sarah and Lawless teaming up to solve future crimes? Quite a few of us enjoyed the offshore of the money and the chip/tattoo with the hidden code.
We talked about the characters and their personalities, etc. Many were very happy there were no crooked cops in this story! The slap vote went to Harker with 3 for Nolan, the “wimpy character”. It was mentioned about the play on words regarding Worthe for the cult and Lawless for the FBI guy.
There were some negatives – again the airplane graveyard ending and the fact Sarah was caught by her credit card when she is a skip tracer and should have knew better! Dave and others talked about the RFID chip in Zoe along with the GPS in Theresa’s crucifix. Also Dave mentioned about Sarah’s “inner James Bond” coming out in the end which ruined the story some for him personally. Jeff thought that Zoe as a 5 year old sometimes acted too adult for her age.
Not much more to say, when it is an enjoyable book we have faster discussions!
Next month, Kerry will be leading Live by Night by Dennis Lehane and Judy providing snacks (Kerry send her a reminder email!). We passed out all of the books, so if you are able to read it and return to the library – please let the group know.
Happy Memorial Day all!!
Sharon Long
PS I just finished The Son, Jo Nesbo’s latest stand alone book. Very good and totally different than Harry Hole, still crime and murder but less gore.