Promo plug – You can still enter to win my box of books—ends March 10th. You can still enter to win a $50 gift card from the authors of Booklover’s Bench. (And, you can refer a friend. Each time one of your refer­rals enters, YOU get an extra entry.) Ends March 17th.

I’ve said many times that I’m a mys­tery lover. That means I like to be in the shoes of the detec­tive and find the clues as they’re revealed to the char­ac­ter. The detec­tive (or who­ever is solv­ing the crime) can’t be privy to what’s going on when he or she isn’t there, so if I’m read­ing a ‘who­dunit’ I don’t want to know until the char­ac­ter does.

But what about book blurbs? How much should the tell a poten­tial reader about the book? Should they con­tain spoil­ers? And what con­sti­tutes a spoiler? I know when I was deal­ing with Find­ing Sarah, I didn’t want to write any­thing about what I hoped would sur­prise read­ers. How­ever, by the time I fin­ished with edits, the “sur­prise” was no longer way back in Chap­ter 6. Instead, it was more like Page 6. So (and since it’s in the blurb, I don’t think I’m spoil­ing any­thing here) the blurb now men­tions right up front that she was robbed at gun­point. I didn’t go so far as to indi­cate WHO held her up, so there was still a poten­tial to sur­prise the reader.

Some­times what we might con­sider “spoil­ers” are so much a part of the genre that it doesn’t really mat­ter. In a romance, the hero and hero­ine will fall in love and have their Hap­pily Ever After. Blurbs for romances gen­er­ally set up the major con­flict, and this con­flict appears early on in the book.

In the book I’m read­ing (and thor­oughly enjoy­ing, so this is meant only as a dis­cus­sion point, not a crit­i­cism), read­ers know up front that there’s a dog wounded in com­bat, and a cop wounded in the line of duty. Both are suf­fer­ing from emo­tional issues, and although I’ve barely cracked the sur­face of the story, I can make a few pre­dic­tions. First and fore­most, because the blurb and all promo talks about how the dog and cop come together to help each other heal, you’re expect­ing it to happen.

The author does an excel­lent job of set­ting up the dog’s life as a “bomb dog” for the Marines (told from the dog’s POV). And another excel­lent job of show­ing us what hap­pened to the cop. But they don’t meet until Chap­ter 5, over 50 pages into the book.

Hub­ster was read­ing this book before I started it, and I asked him how he liked it. He said it was fine, but he was impa­tient. He said it was obvi­ous the dog and cop would have to get together, and his base reac­tion was, “Get to it already.”

So, my ques­tion to you: How much do you want to know about a book before you start. And if you know some­thing is sup­posed to hap­pen, do you find your­self wait­ing for it? Per­haps even skim­ming until you get there? Even if the author is tal­ented, do you have that nig­gling in the back of your head say­ing this is all setup and the real stuff is yet to come? Or do you avoid read­ing book blurbs (or reviews) altogether?