How to Read a Suspense Novel With a Group

Eight women, one paperback, one month. That is the whole plan, and it comes apart in the same place nearly every time. A suspense novel is built to be read fast, alone, late, with the lamp still on. A church book group reads slow, out loud, and in company. Try to run a book like that at the pace of a fellowship meeting and week one goes fine, week two has two readers finished and one still on page forty, and the last three weeks become an exercise in nobody saying the wrong thing. I have taken our group through this five times now, and I have made about every mistake there is to make. What follows is the version that worked.

The book that taught me the most was Too Close to Home by Lynette Eason. It is a Revell paperback, 336 pages, book one of four in the Women of Justice series, and it carries close to seven thousand ratings on Amazon at around four and a half stars, so you are not the first group to try it. What suits a group is the shape of it: an FBI agent and a detective working one case together, some romance running alongside the case, and a subject serious enough that nobody treated our meeting as a social hour. What fights a group is the same thing every suspense novel fights a group with. It wants to be finished, and it wants to be finished before anybody else at the table.

How to Read a Suspense Novel With a Group, Step by Step

Step 1: Choose a book the slowest reader in the room can finish

The first question is not whether the book is good. It is whether the slowest reader at the table can finish it in a month without giving up her evenings. Do the arithmetic out loud before anyone votes. Too Close to Home runs 336 pages. Over four weeks that is 84 pages a week, which is twelve pages a night with Sunday off, and for most of the women I know that is a bus ride and half an hour after supper. A longer book is a different proposition entirely. I have watched a group agree to something thick in September and quietly lose three members by the third week, and those three did not come back in October either.

Then check the subject, not just the length. Eason writes clean, and clean is the reason half our table reads her at all. Clean is not the same as easy. The case in this one involves missing teenagers, and that is hard going for a parent or a grandparent even when every page of it stays decent. One of ours, who buried a child years ago, sat that month out, and I did not try to talk her into it. Say the subject out loud when you hand out the book and let people decide for themselves. A group that loses a reader for one month usually keeps her for the next ten.

One more thing before you commit the group: it is book one of four. For some readers that is a gift, and they will have the second one on order before the meeting ends. For others it is a trap, because they wanted one book and not a commitment. Tell them plainly that the series continues and that stopping after one is allowed. Then nobody feels sold something they did not ask for.

Step 2: Divide the book into four chunks before anyone opens it

Do not hand out a book and hope people pace themselves. They will not. Sit down with the page count and a card, write four numbers on it, and put a copy in every book. For this one the card reads 84, 168, 252, and 336, with a date beside each. It takes four minutes and it saves the month. There is something about a written number that makes a reader pick the book up on a Tuesday instead of waiting for a free Saturday that never comes.

Then give the fast readers a rule they can live with, because they are going to read ahead no matter what you say. My rule is this: read ahead if you must, but do not talk ahead. If you are sure you have the thing worked out on page ninety, write the page number and the date on your note page and close the book on it. That way the fast reader is not sitting on her hands for three weeks and the slow reader is not hearing the answer in the parking lot.

Name a catch-up week on the card and mean it. If half the room is behind at the third Tuesday, take the fourth week for catching up and push the meeting. A month is not a covenant. I have done this twice and both times the discussion was better for it, because everyone had actually read to the end.

Step 3: Keep one page of notes, dated

I keep a pencil and a small notebook on the side table by my chair, and I have done it for thirty years. One page per book. The date I started, the date I finished, and who I would hand it to. For a suspense novel I add a fourth line: the page where I first thought I knew. That line gets a date beside it too.

The dating matters more than it sounds. At the meeting there is always a woman who says she had it figured out by the second chapter, and there is always another who says nobody could have seen it coming at all. With dated notes you can settle it without anybody's memory being on trial. I read the dates out, we all laugh, and we move on to the questions.

Do not write in a borrowed copy. Half the books that come through our group belong to somebody else, and a pencil mark in the margin of a friend's paperback is a small betrayal. Keep a slip of paper in the back instead, and take it out before you hand the book along.

Read ahead if you must. Just do not talk ahead. The fast readers need somewhere to put what they know, and a dated line in a notebook is that place.

Step 4: Bring three questions, not thirty

The printed discussion guides with twenty questions in them are built for a classroom, not a fellowship room. An hour holds three questions, four if the coffee is strong. I pick them the week before, write them on a half sheet, and hand the sheet out at the start so nobody is composing an answer while somebody else is talking.

The shape I use is one question about the case, one about the people, and one about what the book was doing underneath. The third is the one that matters and the one most groups skip. With this novel it was about how the faith sat in the story. Eason puts it in the fabric of the people rather than stapling a lesson onto the last chapter, and that is what I want from a Revell novel and what I do not always get. Two of our eight said they would have liked more of it. That is a real conversation, and it lasted longer than the question about the case.

Write your three questions so that none of them can be answered with the name of a person who turns out to be guilty. A question that invites the answer spoils the book as surely as saying it out loud.

Step 5: Run the meeting in three passes and hold the ending

Open with a pass and no discussion. Every woman gets one sentence, no interruptions, no replies. It feels stiff for the first two minutes and then it does its job, because the quiet ones have already spoken before the loud ones settle in. Then the three questions. Then the open floor, which is where the good arguing happens.

The ending rule is the one that keeps a group together. Nobody names the culprit, nobody describes the last chapter, nobody says who lives, until every person at the table has finished. If someone is at page two hundred, she says so at the start of the meeting, and the rest of us talk around her without being told twice. It helps to say the rule out loud at the beginning of every month, because a new member has never heard it.

Then there is guessing, which is a different thing and should be allowed. Dottie is 74 and has read beside me longer than anybody at that table, and she guesses by page forty every single month. She is right more often than the odds should permit. We do not argue with her and we do not ask her to hush. I write her guess in the notebook, dated, and read it out at the end. Our meeting on this book ran twenty minutes over, the longest we have had, and most of it was Dottie.

What Else Helps

Coffee, a printed list of the next six months, and one ground rule: you may say you did not like a book without apologizing for it. Groups go quiet and polite when they think disagreement is rude, and a polite group is a group that stops meeting within a year. The books can stand a bad review. The women can stand one too.

Keep a lending copy apart from your own. My hall bookcase holds what I keep and the rest goes on to somebody else, but Too Close to Home has stayed, because the group asks for it and I would rather hand over mine than have a member buy a book she ends up not liking. If you want a second opinion before you commit eight women to it, I wrote about this one on its own, and I set it beside Covert Justice in a separate piece. Both say plainly who the book suits and who it does not.

And read the listing before you buy, not the cover. The back cover is written to sell the book to one person. The listing tells you the page count, the publisher, the trim size, and whether you are standing at the front of a series or the middle of one. Those four facts decide whether your month goes well far more than the blurb does.