Private by James PattersonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Jacket Blurb: The police can't help you....
Former Marine helicopter pilot Jack Morgan runs Private, a renowned investigation company with branches around the globe. It is where you go when you need maximum force and maximum discretion. The secrets of the most influential men and women on the planet come to Jack daily - and his staff of investigators uses the world's most advanced forensic tools to make and break their cases.
The press will destroy you....
Jack is already deep into the investigation of a multi-million dollar NFL gambling scandal and the unsolved slayings of 18 schoolgirls when he learns of a horrific murder close to home: his best friend's wife, Jack's former lover, has been killed. It nearly pushes him over the edge. Instead, Jack pushes back and devotes all of Private's resources to tracking down her killer.
Only one place to turn: Private....
But Jack doesn't have to play by the rules. As he closes in on the killer and chooses between revenge and justice, Morgan has to navigate a workplace love affair that threatens to blow the roof off his plans. With a plot that moves at death-defying speeds, Private is James Patterson's sleekest, most exciting thriller ever.
Read as an audio book. "New to me" series.
The first thing I noticed in this book is there is a lot of stuff going on - multiple romances and multiple mysteries. There is the mystery of how to find the who's killing the girls (the reader knows who, the protagonists don't). There is the mystery of Shelby's murder and how much trouble Andy, her husband, is in. There is the mystery "You're Dead" caller. There is the question of who's rigging the NFL games. And we have a slew of smaller mysteries - how much trouble is Jack's brother actually in? What are Jack's missing memories from Afghanistan? We have the romance between Jackie and Bobbie, and the romance between Jack and Colleen.
So many threads and plots and sub plots really walked a fine line between information overload and mystery miss-direction. As an audio book reader, it had me confused more than once who the character was on the "page" and which sub-plot they were involved in.
With that being said, this is an incredibly fast read, even as an audio book. A bit predictable, but I'm okay with that. It becomes more of a confirmation of my guessing abilities and almost a game to see how much I can figure out.
I will fully admit right up front, I am not a fan of knowing who the antagonists are ahead of time, and for the mystery of the murdered girls, the reader sees the creep (and he is truly a creep) in action.
Overall, I feel the authors did a decent job of pulling all the threads together coherently together at the end. A few things were left waving tantalizing in the wind, enough to pull the reader toward the next book(s). Perhaps my biggest complaint was with the final love interest fallout/hook up at the end. It would have been nice if the authors could have stepped around that standard mystery trope where the guy gets bedded after all is said and done.
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