Richard North Patterson x 6 PB Thrillers All Listed

Review

A successful San Francisco lawyer returns to Lake City, Ohio, to defend a childhood friend on murder charges - and to confront the townsfolk who are convinced that the lawyer himself is a killer. A generation ago, Anthony Lord and Sam Robb thought the defining moment of their high-school careers would be when one of them was named Athlete of the Year. But all that changed when class president Alison Taylor was raped and strangled minutes after saying good-night to Tony. Despite the efforts of the Lake City police and the hatred of everyone in town - only Sam and his girlfriend, Sue Cash, stood by him - Tony was never charged with the murder, and eventually escaped to Harvard Law, a movie-star wife, and a son who's the age Alison was when she died. Now a desperate call from Sue Robb brings Tony back to Lake City. Sam, currently the track coach at Lake City High, has been accused of murdering Marcie Calder, one of his star athletes. The evidence is as damning as you'd expect: Sam was carrying on a heated affair with Marcie, who was pregnant with his child and refused an abortion. Even more unnervingly, however, nobody seems to have left Lake City for the past 27 years except for Tony and the dead. So Tony is constantly running into figures from his tainted past - Alison's bereaved parents, the fence-straddling teacher who'd refused him a college recommendation - now recast in painful new roles that prevent Tony from trying the murder of Marcie Calder without investigating the murder of Alison Taylor. Despite the odds against him, Tony is every bit as tenacious in the courtroom as Patterson's earlier heroes (The Final Judgment, 1995, etc.); and readers who relish legal dogfights are in for hours of expertly turned battle, even though most of them will guess the final revelation long before the gavel comes down. (Kirkus Reviews)

Protect and Defend

Review

Fifteen-year-old Mary Ann Tierney is pregnant with a hydrocephalic foetus and wants an abortion - but she is forced to take on her parents and the constitutional law of the USA in a desperate bid to protect her future right to bear children. The ramifications of her case threaten the new President, his nominee for Chief Justice and his main rival for the Presidency for all have dangerous secrets in their past.

Patterson is best known for his crime thrillers, but here he ventures into the world of high politics and social concerns. The result is no less absorbing, the focus just as sharp. A particular strength is his choice of an issue very much of our times - one with which many families will identify. Mary Ann Tierney, a 15-year-old Californian girl, is pregnant with a brain-damaged child that she wants to abort. However, a new law requires parental consent - and there is the problem. Mary Ann's parents are pro-lifers and will not agree to termination, even though they know the birth could leave their daughter sterile. When Mary Ann enlists lawyer Sarah Dash to fight her corner, alarm is raised at the White House where new President Kerry Kilcannon has just arrived. Kerry intends to appoint Caroline Clark Masters as the United States's first female Chief Justice - but Caroline and Sarah are former colleagues, and it is clear that this abortion issue could undermine the government. The plot becomes more complex, relationships intertwine and we find that moral dilemmas affect more players than at first seemed apparent. The characters are so strong that the reader will find it hard not to root for one side or the other, or even both. Patterson's story could be seen as a treatise on the pro- or anti-abortion issue and he certainly makes his own stance clear. To that extent the eventual outcome is foreshadowed, but getting there proves to be a tense passage. This is a blockbusting story in whatever genre you care to define it, and Patterson's writing is as ever blessedly unpretentious. (Kirkus UK)

Eyes of a Child

Description

Chris Paget's well ordered world is blown apart by his love for his assistant, Terri, in the sequel to Degree of Guilt. Terri's ex husband, Ricky, is determined to destroy them both and instigates a child custody battle for Terri's four-year old daughter, accusing Terri of neglect and Paget's teenage son of sexual molestation. Then Ricky is murdered and Paget finds himself the principle suspect, on trial for his life. Eyes of a Child demonstrates why North Patterson is an international bestselling author. The pace is superb, the court room scenes unsurpassable, but most importantly the compelling characters, particularly Ricky, Terri's cunning and amoral husband, show North Patterson as one of the strongest storytellers writing today.

No Safe Place

Review

Books about American politics are often baffling and No Safe Place is no exception. Set during seven days in a closely contested presidential primary, it is a rather leaden plod towards a denouement that is telegraphed from very early on, and the shocking climax promised never materializes. (Kirkus UK)

Patterson, who's made bestseller lists with legal suspensers like Degree of Guilt (1992) and Silent Witness (1997), is back to his first love, national politics, with this tale of a star-crossed senator's race for the California primary vote. The move from the courtroom to the campaign trail isn't such a big one, not only because Patterson's thrillers have always involved political figures, but because the ordeal of electoral politics - the courteous evasions, the unrelenting back-and-forth with the press, the candidates' endless triangulation of everything from who they are to which blocs of voters they need to curry - so resembles the stuff of legal intrigue that you can see why so many lawyers run for office. Here, Kerry Kilcannon, a New Jersey senator whose main claims to fame are that his brother, a highly regarded presidential candidate 12 years ago, was gunned down, like Bobby Kennedy, minutes after winning the California primary, and that he is constitutionally incapable-it seems-of telling a lie. Like a more polished version of Warren Beatty's Bulworth, Kerry has been poking his finger in Vice President Dick Mason's eye for years, attacking the heir-presumptive's ties to special interests and in the process staking out common-sense positions on gun control, the death penalty, socialized medicine, and campaign finance. As Kerry comes down the home stretch, though, two bombs are ticking away. A news magazine has gotten hold of a devastating story about his relationship with Lava Costello, a reporter who's covering the campaign (lots of high-minded speeches on every side of the issues here); and an assassin fresh from a bloodbath at a Boston abortion clinic has come to San Francisco to meet the candidate. Patterson makes as much of the resulting threats as he can, but decent, haunted Kerry never seems to be in half as much trouble as some real politicians are that you can't help thinking of. The big revelation here is how easy it is to write great speeches when you're a novelist who doesn't have to pander to anybody because you're not running for election.

The Outside Man

Review

In The Lasko Tangent (1978), Patterson lent a tart touch of narrative class to an otherwise routine Washington-conspiracy plot. And now, similarly, he shows glimmers of talent even as he tediously recycles a far more shopworn commodity: the inbred-community murder mystery that expands into a merry-go-round of uncovered secrets, psycho-sexual and otherwise. The victim here is Mrs. Lydia Cantrell, a society matron of Birmingham, Alu.; she's found strangled in her manse by narrator Adam Shaw-a northern Catholic lawyer (haunted son of a murdered cop) who has only recently become reasonably comfortable in his wife's WASPy social set or in the law firm of his domineering father-in-law. And among the suspects is Adam's dear friend Henry Cantwell, Lydia's book-loving husband - so Adam determines to do all he can to clear Henry of suspicion, which means exploring all possible angles. Could the murder be revenge for the long-ago miscarriage of justice perpetrated by Lydia's father against two black men? Did Lydia have a lover? Did Lydia's foul son Jason know that she was about to cut him out of her will? Why did the murderer mutilate a painting of Lydia and why did someone deal similarly with a picture of Adam's wife Kris Ann? In a series of talky scenes, Adam opens all these cans of worms, resulting in near-soap-operatic revelations of adultery, homosexuality, questionable paternity, alcoholism, bygone rape attempts, etc. And then, after Henry's suicide, there's a long, final, psychoobsessive revelation close to home which neither surprises nor convinces. Still, Patterson reaffirms his knack for dialogue (though there's much too much of it here) - and if he can break out of contrived genre writing, he may yet produce suspense of distinction.

The Final Judgement (Damage to spine)

A young man is brutally murdered. His distraught girlfriend is the prime suspect. Her aunt, Caroline Masters, about to take up a top job in the US Court of Appeals, decides to defend the young woman in the murder trial. But this will be Caroline's first contact with her family in almost twenty years, and as she prepares the case and goes through the trial, long forgotten secrets re-surface, pitting Caroline against not only the police and prosecution, but also against her father (a retired judge), her sister and the memory of her young self when she, too, lost a boyfriend in suspicious circumstances. The Final Judgement is a powerful, poignant, page-turning legal thriller that confirms Richard North Patterson as among the very best writers in the bookselling area.

Creases to spines/covers, and light tanning, you may find previous owners name inside of cover.

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