3rd time, not the charm

3rd Degree by James Patterson.

In this, the third book featuring the Women's Murder Club the story follows tough homicide detective Lindsay Boxer, as she struggles through a burning fire, apparantly started by 'August Spies' in an apparant terrorist attack. Starting a terrorism investigation, bringing in Deputy Director Joe Molinari of Homeland Security. Through all this Boxer also struggles through her deep feelings for good friend Jill Barnhardt, whose perfect marriage isn't so perfect after all.

This book truly was a matter of struggles. First you have to struggle with the slow pace of the book. It became almost painful to watch as Boxer was unable to put together simple concepts and come to clear conclusions.

The story, which actually became quite intereseting over the last 10 chapters, was stretched too thin. In fact, while reading this book, it felt as if Patterson just couldn't be bothered to write a compelling story. Rather, he wrote a novella length story and just fleshed it out, taking far longer to get interesting.

If you're stuck in an airport, with few other choices, you will want to pick this up. Otherwise, you should stick to more compelling stories.

Fast-paced but ordinary read

The third book in Patterson's Women's Murder Club series turned out to be rather disappointing for this longtime fan. This time around, the four women are in the middle of killings by a group that calls itself 'August Spies' and appears to be targetting the big corporations.

While Patterson manages to keep the reader hooked with his trademark short chapters and the shifts between first and third person narratives, the novel lacks the "I-never-saw-them-coming" twists that he is known for. It is disappointingly straightfoward and the larger canvas(with buzzwords like terrorism and homeland security) takes away the personal touch Patterson always manages to achieve. Granted there is one unexpected development that really shakes things up and reenergizes the proceedings. But it seems manipulative and thrown in only because Patterson realized that the main story wasn't going to allow him to introduce as many twists as he would have liked to.

On the whole, 3rd degree turns out to be a 2nd rate novel from an author whose books are always 1st on my to-read list!

A Fast-Paced Tale From the Number One Writer of Suspense

If you liked the previous stories in this series (1st To Die and 2nd Chance), you should love this one. It has the same women, Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer, of the San Francisco police, Assistant District Attorney Jill Bernhardt, Medical Examiner Claire Washburn, and San Francisco Chronicle reporter Cindy Thomas. It has Patterson's brief chapters, terse dialog, and headlong rush through a tale of danger and suspense, It grabs you in the first chapter. As Lindsay Boxer jogs past a townhome, it explodes into a mass of fire, killing a corporate CEO. Three days later, another executive is poisoned, and the police find that they face a gang of terrorists that promise to kill every three days. The terrorists are smart, clever, and ready to strike back at the police. From this recipe, we get an intense story that races to a climax.