The Summer House - James Patterson and Brendan DuBois

I haven’t read a James Patterson book in a while, but I picked up THE SUMMER HOUSE because the co-author (who probably did most of the actual writing) is Brendan DuBois, who I know to be a good writer. And not surprisingly, THE SUMMER HOUSE turns out to be a pretty darned good thriller.

It opens with the brutal mass murder of seven people in an old vacation house in Georgia (the summer house of the title), and soon after, four Army Rangers from the nearby military base are arrested for the crimes. Army CID sends in a team of investigators to look into the case, even though it seems pretty open-and-shut. Guess what? It’s not. All sorts of sinister things are going on, and pretty soon our Army detectives are up to their necks in mysteries and danger.

Three of the investigators consider themselves cops more than soldiers: the leader, a former NYPD detective who was seriously wounded while serving in Afghanistan; an ambitious former detective from Los Angeles; and a female former highway patrol officer from Maryland. The other two members of the team are a lawyer and a psychologist, who aren’t really cut out for action but find themselves forced into such situations anyway. For most of the book, they all seem pretty overmatched against the vast, shadowy, sinister forces arrayed against them.

Patterson and DuBois do a couple of things I really don’t like. The book is written in present tense, and it switches back and forth between first and third person. There’s only one first person POV, though, which at least helps a little. Those things can be overcome, though, if the story and characters are good enough, and they are in THE SUMMER HOUSE. The authors keep things moving along at such a nice pace that I had no trouble sticking with the book, even though it’s a little longer than the novels I usually read. (It’s not a real behemoth. Maybe 100K words.) By the last fourth of the book, I was really flipping the digital pages to find out what was going to happen, and that’s one of the best things I can say about any novel.

Patterson and DuBois have done a couple of other books together, and I enjoyed this one enough that I think there’s a good chance I’ll go back and read them, too. I’m not a big fan of contemporary thrillers, but I liked THE SUMMER HOUSE and think it’s well worth reading.

The Witnesses - James Patterson and Brendan DuBois

The family next door has a very dark secret.

The Sanderson family has been forced into hiding after one of them stumbled upon a criminal plot. Or so they think. No one will answer their questions. And the terrifying truth may come too late....

Man, this book is fast-paced. I didn't read it in one sitting, but I did read it in one day, which is unusual for me. Like all James Patterson novels (no matter who actually writes them), the chapters are short, there's lots of dialogue, there are innocents and truly despicable bad guys, and the plot twists are considerable. In this case, you've got an archeologist, his travel guide author wife, and their two kids (one of whom is a bit unusual) as the innocent family in trouble and being protected by a stalwart government agent, plus the people out to get them and some unlikely allies.

This is part of the Bookshots series, more novellas than novels, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I have no idea how much is Patterson and how much is DuBois, but the prose is really smooth and entertaining. I haven't read anything else by DuBois except the science fiction story "The Siege of Denver", which is very good. I think I need to read more by him, though. I might read more of Patterson's Bookshots, although I'm not a fan of most of the series they spin off from. I really like novellas, though, so I'll probably give the stand-alones a try.

Zoo - James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

James Patterson gets plenty of flack, but I've read a number of his books that I thought were pretty good. It usually depends on who his co-author is on a particular book, and how over-the-top the plot is. (As you know, it's difficult for a writer to get too over-the-top for my taste.)

ZOO is a stand-alone thriller written with Michael Ledwidge, who's collaborated with Patterson on another stand-alone novel I read a while back, THE QUICKIE. I thought that one was okay. Ledwidge is also the co-author of a series about New York police detective Michael Bennett, and I haven't read any of those.

ZOO is sort of like a Seventies disaster movie. Remember the old Fox TV show "When Animals Attack"? That's pretty much the plot of this one. All over the world, animals suddenly go crazy, start acting in uncharacteristic ways, and attack humans. When it gets bad enough, it leads to the sort of global apocalypse usually associated in fiction with nuclear war or zombies. The narrator for most of the book (Patterson and Ledwidge do a little switching back and forth between first- and third-person, but not to the point of being annoying about it) is likable biologist Jackson Oz, who winds up leading a group of scientists trying to find out what caused this phenomenon and what to do about it before humanity is wiped out.

It's certainly not marketed as such, but ZOO is actually a near-future SF novel. I'm not really enough of a scientist to know if what's behind the sudden rise of animal aggression is possible or not (in the words of the great Neal Barrett, Jr., "Who do I look like to you, Mr. Wizard?"), but it all sounds plausible enough and I suppose that's all that really matters in a book like this. There's plenty of action, good characters to root for, and the story really races along. I assume Ledwidge did the bulk of the writing, and it's good enough I might well check out some of the other books he's done with Patterson.

I'm not real sure about the ending, but overall ZOO is probably my second favorite Patterson novel after THE JESTER, a historical adventure yarn set during and after the Crusades that was co-authored with Andrew Gross. I think it's worth reading.

You've Been Warned

A while back I read the first collaboration by James Patterson and Howard Roughan, HONEYMOON, and thought it was pretty good, so I was willing to give this one a try. It has the usual twisty Patterson plot – nanny/aspiring photographer Kristin Burns is having an affair with the husband of the wealthy couple she works for, with a lot of deception and potential murder thrown in – but the book has some elements in it that smack of horror fiction, too, such as the ghosts who keep showing up and the thousands of cockroaches that invade Kristin’s apartment. The authors keep this one racing along in the usual fast-moving style with ultra-short chapters and lots of surprises. However, despite those surprises I wound up feeling that the book was missing a vital twist or two that should have been there, so at the end I said, “That’s it?” I enjoyed it enough that I’d read another one by Patterson and Roughan (and it’s already out, a novel called SAIL), but I’m not going to get in any hurry to do so.

The Quickie -- James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

I’ve learned to keep an open mind about James Patterson’s books. I’ve tried his two popular series, the ones featuring Alex Cross and the Women’s Murder Club, and don’t care for either of them. But I’ve read and enjoyed some of his stand-alones. A lot depends on who his co-author is on a particular book.

THE QUICKIE is Patterson’s second collaboration with Michael Ledwidge. I started his first one with Ledwidge, STEP ON A CRACK, and thought it was pretty well-written, but it got derailed quickly by a really silly plot and I didn’t finish it. THE QUICKIE is considerably better. It’s about a woman who has an affair to get even with her husband for cheating on her, and in the process she gets involved with a convoluted criminal conspiracy that puts her life in danger several times. That’s about all I can say about the plot without giving away too much, because this is one of those books where nothing is what it appears to be at first, with some major twists and turns along the way. I’m a sucker for that sort of plot, so I enjoyed the book. It does stretch believability pretty close to the breaking point toward the end, but it never quite gets there.

Another thing I like about Patterson’s books is there’s very little padding to them. Everything advances the story at rocket-like speed, and with the short chapters and the amount of white space, the books really aren’t very long. As with Robert B. Parker’s books, the publisher makes them look heftier than they really are. Appropriately enough, I raced right through THE QUICKIE and had a good time reading it. I wouldn’t want a steady diet of this sort of book, but they make for a nice change of pace every now and then.