Seed on the Wind by Rex Stout

Seed on the Wind
by Rex Stout

ISBN-13: 9781803364841
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Released: December 12, 2023

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
The lawyer, the jeweler, the art critic, and the oil-company man: Lora Winter has had a child with each of them. But when one of these men drives up to her house with a fifth man in the car, Lora runs to hide. This extraordinary novel's many desperate characters resort to kidnapping a baby, blackmailing another of the fathers, and possibly even murdering a baby (though Lora refuses to consider abortion). Rex Stout wrote this novel in 1930.


My Review:
Seed on the Wind is fiction set in the 1920s to 1930. There was no mystery and no romance (the sex was about pleasure or making babies). Whatever the point of this story was, I totally missed it. Lora was the point-of-view character, but she had little personality and felt fairly passive to me, not thinking through the consequences of her actions and then desperately trying to deal with them. There was no "psychological jigsaw puzzle" as there was no puzzle and certainly no focus on a crime (for example, a baby was kidnapped by a relative but promptly retrieved by Lora). There was no suspense, only mild curiosity at best. The characters weren't even interesting to me. I felt I was sold a crime and was given one of the most boring books I've recently read.

The story started at the end, when Lora's first lover showed up and threatened things with her current, comfortable life. Then we go back in time to explain how the man who's currently supporting her met her and got her pregnant. Then we go back to how the previous man (and father of one of her children) met her, and so on back to the beginning. She was mistress to only one man at a time, but she didn't love these men and basically was a prostitute, using her body to support herself and her children.

While there was plenty of sex, the focus was more on the participant's attitudes than physical descriptions of the act. There was a fair amount of bad language.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.