The Run: A Novel

4 hours of my life I will never get back. I wish I was the type that could stop reading garbage once I start a book because it was quite obvious early on.

The Margin
Congressman Will Lee has decided to run for President of the U.S., the story develops around the campaign. Herein lies the good and the bad of this Stuart Woods novel. There is an enormous amount of information about campaigning that is very interesting since this (2008) is an election year. That part is interesting just from an educational point of view, however it crowds out the action normally seen in a Woods mystery. Throughout The Run there are a few assassination attempts and there is some action/excitment around these events. The ending is action filled, if you can wait that long.
As far as my recommendation, it's an okay novel, but far from his best.

I just read this book and it was absolutely wonderful from the beginning to the end. Non-stop action, surprises through out and just enough sex to make it interesting without over-doing it. A great read. Especially as we enter another season of presidential elections, this book is very timely and very entertaining.

Will Lee, Senator from Georgia, is given disturbing news by his friend and Vice President Joe Adams. Joe will not be running for President in the 2000 election because he was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Will must not only keep Joe's secret, but make decisions regarding his own political future and presidential campaign. But Will soon learns that a presidential campaign is harder than he could have ever predicted complicated by both the political wranglings of enemies and opponents, and by the threats posed by those enemies outside political circles, but equally motivated by political agendas. The question remains - which of these enemies is more dangerous and Will survive them both in his bid to become the next President of the United States?

The Run trots along at a decent pace but is not the fastest paced thriller around. The plot is decent and brings back memories of the extremely close presidential election that did, in fact, take place in 2000. But overall it is just average. The story is predictable and hardly more original than other political thrillers of it's caliber or similarly inspired TV shows. However, politial thrillers will always please a certain type of reader and for those readers this will be a fairly quick, easy, and generally entertaining read.

Overall it was a very enjoyable story, full of historically accurate presidential anecdotes and trivia. Saying that, however, how is it that the author Mr. Woods tells us that the Presidential Guest House (Blair House) is the Vice Presidents official residence, when the whole world knows that that the VP lives in the "Admiral's House" on the grounds of the Naval Observatory? Mr. Woods tells us this misinformation two separate times. I first thought that Mr. Woods was foreshadowing and Blair House being so close to the White House would become the scene of some future (mis)adventures, but it turned out that after declaring it twice to be the Vice President's residence, nothing further is said about it. Other than that glaring error, and a few other minor ones, it was Stuart's best story since "Chiefs". I recommend it highly.