Private: #1 Suspect

Private: #1 Suspect

James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

Ok, the Alex Cross novels are one of my guilty pleasures. So, it was with high hopes that I picked p “Private: #1 Suspect” from my library’s shelves. 

It did not take long for my hopes to be laid low. Wooden characters with more strings than Pinocchio and a contrived plotline, with obvious product placements made this a slog, not a piece of forbidden chocolate.  

Jack Morgan heads a world-wide investigations firm called “Private.” Morgan is a Marine injured in Afghanistan.  His father, just before his death under unusual circumstances, handed him the keys to Private, which Morgan has built up into a world-wide agency. 

Morgan has an identical twin brother who was expelled from the family empire, and has started a firm of his own. This situation has promise.

However, Jack Morgan comes home from a business trip to find a former lover dead in his bed. All evidence points to Jack, who quickly points out that all DNA evidence would be the same for him as his brother. Trouble is, brother has an alibi. He was with his loving wife.

Besides his now dead lover, Jack has an off-again-on-again relationship with an employee and is getting cozy with a client who has had a rash of killings in her oh-so-exclusive Los Angeles hotels.

Add a Mob hit on another Mob’s shipment of Oxycontin, and a young actor accused of murder, and Jack is a busy boy.

Lots of plots. It would have been nice if they had twisted together somehow, but that did not happen. Suffice it to say that Patterson looks to be launching a new series. 

But it has nowhere near the heart of his other books.