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.

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.