“The Lucky One” by Nicholas Sparks

"The Lucky One" by Nicholas Sparks
2008, Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-446-57993-3

"The Lucky One" by Nicholas Sparks is a really, really good book. I really couldn’t put it down once I’d started. Nicholas Sparks is a terrific writer and you can figure whatever you read by him is going to be a good read.

In The Lucky One" Logan is a Marine in Iraq. He finds a picture in the sand one day. It is a picture of a young woman. For some reason he is beguiled, but he figures that whoever has lost this photo will want it back. He pins it up on the bulletin board and it sits there day after day with nobody claiming it. One day he walks by and takes it off the board to put it into his pocket. And, that’s when his luck changed.

After that he couldn’t lose at poker games, games he’d managed to lose a significant amount of money in when he’d first started playing them. That was the first thing that happened. Then, there were all the near misses where he survived attacks and bomb blasts. He didn’t think anything of it, but his friend Victor was convinced that it was because of the picture he’d kept in his pocket.

When he got out of the Marines he and Victor decided to visit and catch up on a fishing trip. As they talked Victor told Logan that he’d been seeing ghosts of all their fellow Marines who had died in Iraq. Then, tragedy struck and Victor died in a senseless accident that, by rights, should have killed Logan too.

That’s when Logan decided to find the young woman in the photograph.

I’m not telling you any more. It would spoil the story. This is a riveting book, a mystery, a romance and an all around terrific novel.