Covers that show action

Okay, so, I happened across this post over the weekend at Bones, Books, and Buffy:

The Friday Face-Off was created by Books by Proxy, where each week bloggers can showcase books with covers centered around a weekly theme. You can visit Lynn’s Books for a list of upcoming themes. Join in the fun each Friday by finding a book whose cover is based on the theme!

This week’s theme: A cover that depicts action of some sort.

And then three book covers depicting action, which you can click through to read if you wish. The person doing this post — Tammy — commented that it was surprising hard to find covers depicting action among the books she’s read recently.

Really? I said. So I went to Amazon and skimmed through the (many) books I’ve bought this year, and you know what? Hardly any of them depict action! Have you noticed that?

Of course for romances, you don’t get covers with action, as a rule. You get That Shirtless Dude or The Lady In A Regency Ballgown or whatever. But for everything else, it turns out, action is also just astoundingly rare on covers.

Here’s one that sort of might qualify? I mean, there is MOVEMENT, even if I’m not sure there is ACTION.

This is some sort of light paranormal mystery or something, I forget, the price was low and it looked like it might be fun, that’s all I remember. Yep, looking at it again, I see it’s free on Amazon.

I had to go 18 books down in my orders before I found one with even this much action. In 58 books that Amazon shows I’ve purchased this year, this is the closest I came to a book showing action on the cover.

That’s really kind of remarkable. There’s a woman on a motorcycle, but the motorcycle is at rest. There’s a soldier, but he’s floating quietly in space. Murderbot is walking, not running, across the top of some sort of space ship. A guy is walking, not running, down a tunnel of some kind on another cover. Here’s a spaceship, but like most spaceships, it could be sitting still, there’s no sense of motion involved in this cover.

Okay, moving farther back, last fall I got this one:

These people appear to be ABOUT to be active, at least. There’s certainly a sense of movement and urgency here.

Okay, here’s one:

There, at last, is incontrovertible action.

I had to scroll back a remarkably long way to find that. It looks to me like fewer than one novel in fifty shows action on the cover. I never would have guessed.

If you’re reading a novel right now that shows action on the cover, or you did recently, out of curiosity, what was the book?