22 Seconds by James Patterson

Posted June 9, 2022 by louisesr in Review, Uncategorized / 1 Comment

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
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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.

The Stories of my Life Book Review

Posted June 6, 2022 by louisesr in Review / 0 Comments

The Stories of my Life by James Patterson
Published by Hachette UK on June 6, 2022
Genres: Autobiography
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

How did a kid whose dad lived in the poorhouse become the most successful storyteller in the world?

On the morning he was born, he nearly died.

His dad grew up in the Pogey– the Newburgh, New York, poorhouse.

He worked at a mental hospital in Massachusetts, where he met the singer James Taylor and the poet Robert Lowell.

While he toiled in advertising hell, James wrote the ad jingle line “I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us Kid.”

He once watched James Baldwin and Norman Mailer square off to trade punches at a party.

He’s only been in love twice. Both times are amazing.

Dolly Parton once sang “Happy Birthday” to James over the phone. She calls him J.J., for Jimmy James.

How did a boy from small-town New York become the world’s most successful writer? How does he do it? He has always wanted to write the kind of novel that would be read and reread so many times that the binding breaks and the book literally falls apart. As he says, “I’m still working on that one.”

This is a strange one for me to review. I had mixed feelings about it and I’m not entirely sure they’re the fault of James Patterson. I had expected this to be an autobiography, and in a way it is – just not in the traditional sense. This is a group of stories of various events that have happened in James Pattersons life but there is no logical groupings and they’re non linear, which is confusing. For example, we have a couple of chapters about working with Bill Clinton and the books they wrote together and then shortly after that we have them meeting for the first time on a golf course.

For the first quarter of the book I was getting very annoyed at the constant name dropping, I had it in my head that this was showing an arrogance on Pattersons part. However, as I read more of the book and got to understand Patterson more I came to realise that it wasn’t arrogance or showing off but that he is genuinely excited and surprised that he has the level of fame that he does and that he has met the people that he has.

I read an arc of this so it was unfinished and the formatting was terrible, this is something that i know will be fixed before it goes on general sale, Im also hoping that it will be more readable. it did feel like an editor still needed to do their job on it.

There is very little about writing in this, I had really hoped for more. Patterson does tell us about books and authors that he loves, and touches on his writing process but its nothing deeper than what he’s revealed in other interviews. One thing that Patterson does do very well in this book is too give credit to other people, be they people he’s worked with in advertising or people involved in the publishing process.

Ultimately, I was disappointed in this book, I much prefer Patterson’s fiction work.

Author: James Patterson