22 Seconds by James Patterson
Series: Womens Murder Club #22
Published by Penguin on 2 May 2022
Genres: Thriller
Pages: 400
Format: ARC
Source: NetGalley
Buy on Amazon, Buy on Bookshop

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Goodreads

22 seconds... until Lindsay Boxer loses her badge—or her life.

SFPD Sergeant Lindsay Boxer has guns on her mind.

There’s buzz of a last-ditch shipment of drugs and weapons crossing the Mexican border ahead of new restrictive gun laws. Before Lindsay can act, her top informant tips her to a case that hits disturbingly close to home.

Former cops. Professional hits. All with the same warning scrawled on their bodies:

You talk, you die.

Now it’s Lindsay’s turn to choose.

You always know what you’re going to get with a James Patterson novel. Short, punchy chapters. Characters you’ve got to know over time and lots of murders. This one also involved drug cartels and illegal gun shipments.

This is the 22nd book in the Women’s Murder Club series which was created by Patterson on the premise that women tend to collaborate far more than men, hence by working together they get the job done. In all honesty, I didn’t find this one to be much of a Murder Club, it was more the Lindsay Boxer show, with her working closely with Joe on the case. Hopefully we’ll get to see a bit more of the other ladies in the future books.

Alongside the frustration with the other characters not being prevalent in this novel, was the chapters. The majority of the chapters are focused on Lindsay, which is fine. But then you’ll get a chapter which is from the POV of one of the other characters. There is nothing to tell you that the perspective is changing. It’s only when you get a couple of paragraphs in and are getting confused as to why it’s jumping around that you realise we are looking at a different character. Just a name under the chapter number would have made it a much pleasanter reading experience.

What I particularly liked was the attention to Julie and how Lindsay and Joe had to consider the risk to their lives and the impact on Julie, ensuring that only one of them was in a high risk situation at any one time. All to often in novels the main characters have a child but if they’re not involved in that particular scene then they seem to get forgotten about. I was really impressed that Julie was present on every page, even when she wasn’t part of the scene.