Grocery Store Books and My First Stuart Woods Novel

We’re all book nerds here, right? 

Do you know where all bookstores in your town are located? Do you frequent independent bookstores where the folks see you and greet you by name? When you travel, do you plan on visiting bookstores in other towns? Do you sign up for newsletters from your favorite authors? Do you know publication dates of books by your favorite authors and clear your reading schedule so you’ll be able to start reading the day that book is released? Do you max out your allowable checkouts at your local library? Do you have more books in your house than you’ll ever be able to read in your lifetime…and yet still buy more?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you, my friend, are a book nerd. We love reading and books. They are a part of our lives.

But what about folks who are not book nerds? Where do they get their books? Yes, they can go to a bookstore but there is another place they go where they can find books. 

Grocery stores

Hurricane Beryl disrupted the lives of a lot of people, including me. A week without power compelled me to get ice and gas from places I don’t normally go to, namely Texas-based HEB grocery stores. They really came through with the ice and gas that week. And, as I am unfamiliar with the layout of the closest one to me, I had to wander the aisles.

This was the book section of one HEB store.

My local Kroger has barely a quarter of this amount. Not sure how and who orders books for HEB but at least there is a decent variety. I snapped this photo for my own sake. I wanted to study which books and authors were available. The standard ones are there that I see in nearly every grocery or drug store: King, Roberts, Patterson, Coben, Steel, Child. There are a few new-to-me folks: Heather Graham, Laura Griffin,  Brad Taylor.

The more I studied the photo at home, the more I was curious. What kinds of books were stocked at a grocery store? I know King and Grisham and Roberts. I’ve read some books by Patterson and Rollins. I resolved to take the books in this photo and actually read some of them. Being paperbacks, I knew they were at least a year old (or in the case of Stephen King’s Dead Zone, forty-five years old). But, being a devoted fan of my local libraries, I searched the Libby app, found a handful, and selected one.

My First Stuart Woods

I’ve known of Stuart Woods for decades but never read any of his books. In fact, the one time a book of his even landed on my radar was a few years ago when fellow author and DoSomeDamage member, Bryon Quertermous, co-wrote a book with Woods. Knowing zero about any of Woods’s characters, I selected Obsession and downloaded both the audio and ebook.

One of the first things that’ll strike you if you pick up a Woods book is the sheer volume of books he’s written. It covered nearly three pages and came with a number of superscripts so you’ll know which character is featured. Obsession is marketed as “A Teddy Fay Novel Featuring Stone Barrington.” Barrington is, according to the list, Woods’s prime character and is in a vast majority of the books. But in Obsession, he plays a supporting role.

Obsession’s main character is Teddy Fay, an actor and former CIA agent. (And, in researching Woods on the internet, Fay has a different origin altogether.) What makes him a fun character is that he has other, very public aliases: Mark Weldon, Oscar-winning actor, and Billy Barnett, movie producer. 

Now, as the creator of the Calvin Carter series—a former actor turned railroad detective in the old west who always operates in disguise—I very much enjoyed Fay’s various scenes when he donned the makeup and did his thing. And co-author Brett Battles did a great job at reminding the reader which alias Fay was sporting and which alias certain characters knew Fay as. 

What I also liked was how Stone Barrington was integrated into the story. He’s a lawyer, an “expert at handling difficult situations” (how’s that for an advertisement for the Barrington series?), and part of the board of directors of the movie studio Fay works for. 

The A Plot involves Carl Novak, a tech billionaire, who wants to partner with Barrington’s movie studio. No sooner do he and Fay meet the man than they learn his wife, Rebecca, has been kidnapped and held for ransom. Here, Fay (in disguise as Billy Barnett) gets to take on the job of finding Rebecca and returning her safely home. You have those “wink at the camera” moments the old Superman TV used to have when “Billy” gets to say things like “I’ll talk to my contact and see if he can help.”

Matthew Wagner is the center of the B Plot. He’s a man obsessed with the lead actress in the movie being filmed. He goes to great length to map out his plan to take out the actress’s husband and make her love him…just like he loves her.

Now, I’ll admit the plot is fairly standard, but what makes it really fun is Fay’s disguises. And Battles does a great job at telling the story from the POV of different characters. I especially enjoyed Fay using his knowledge of certain characters to his advantage (and the disadvantage of others). 

The Verdict

What surprised me a little was how effortless the story actually was. It was like Fay barely broke a sweat doing what he did. He, his team, and their abilities were so far above the bad guys they had to deal with that the bad guys didn’t stand a chance.

If I had to characterize at least this one Grocery Store book, it would be the equivalent of a network TV series. I’m perfectly fine with that, seeing as I continue to watch and enjoy network television. 

And, for the folks who shop at HEB for their weekly groceries and linger on the book aisle and pick up this novel, I think they’d be entertained for a few hours and enjoy themselves. 

The best thing? They will have read a book. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll read another one.

Because you can’t have too many readers in the world.