don’t blink

 

There are some things you do on autopilot.  For me, one of them is reading James Patterson novels.  I started reading them when I was a kid and I haven’t stopped yet.  No matter how bad they get.  But they’re starting to wear on me.

I’m tired of lines like this:

Then he was gone, straight to hell.  Do not pass Go.

Italicized and all.  It bugs me.  At first I attributed it to the fact that he was co-writing with less experienced novelists.  That they must be the issue.  But it’s not.  I’ve noticed it more in the Alex Cross novels that used to be my favorites.  There’s a cheesyness factor that is getting really hard to ignore.  Patterson, being famous for his incredibly short chapters feels the need to leave each chapter with some sort of italicized one liner.  I don’t believe that people think like this in real life.  I don’t even really believe people think like this in make believe life outside of James Patterson’s novels.

That being said Don’t Blink was still a decent novel.  A quick ‘beach read’ if you must.  I don’t really know what that means, but I always see it on the jackets of books.

Nick Daniels is a journalist who is about to write the story of his career when he gets caught in the middle of a mob hit.  Not only does he witness the hit, but he records it on his cassette recorder.  Suddenly, he becomes the most sought after writer there is.  The DA wants him, the police, FBI and the mob.

The story’s got great twists and turns and the action definitely keeps coming.  Besides the cheesy one liners it’s really not that bad.  There’s no strange supernatural crap like he tried in You’ve Been Warned (which Howard Roughan co-wrote with him) and we’re not stuck in the head of some deranged unbelievably uncatchable killer like in Swimsuit.  It’s just a good bad guy versus good guy type of book.  Almost what James Patterson started doing in the first place.

Now out of his combined effort novels, this is no Postcard Killers.  His work with Liza Markund was probably one of the best in a long time.  But it is a close second.