An Extravagant Life: An Autobiography Incorporating Blue Water, Green Skipper

With 87 books under his belt, Edgar Award–winning suspense novelist Woods (Chiefs; “Stone Barrington” series) should have much to say about the difficult act of writing in this memoir, but he doesn’t. The real problem, though, is his account of the rest of his life. It’s neither terribly interesting nor revealing, except for a long segment on sailing that takes up more than half the book (and was published as Blue Water, Green Skipper in 1977). There’s little in Woods’s story of his life to capture readers’ imaginations. The yachting segment describes his first cross-ocean sail race in 1976. While it captures the excitement the experience, non-racing fanatics will soon tire of the technical details. The rest of the book disappoints. Just when his writing life takes off, his telling of it degenerates into a chronicle of his three failed and fourth existent marriages and the purchase, renovation and use of a string of houses, boats, cars and planes (six all told, though not at once). There’s no question life has treated Woods well but his satisfaction with it is off-putting.