Verdict on Latest from Patterson Assembly Line: Humdrum

By Chris Manson September 7, 2006 Issue

I was curious about best-selling author James Patterson, mainly because the guy appears to crank out a new book roughly every other month. Patterson and Peter de Jonge’s recent Beach Road—a potboiler told from multiple perspectives—wasn’t bad. Despite the generous use of white space and chapters that averaged about two-pages apiece, the plot twist sneaked up on me exactly as the authors intended.

Alas, Judge & Jury—written with Andrew Gross—has no such shocking revelation. I suppose my ability to complete the entire novel in the time it normally takes to read an in-depth New York Times article would indicate the novel is not completely devoid of interesting moments. But just about everything within these pages feels telegraphed, like something I’ve seen hundreds of times before. Maybe I’ve been reading too many books by clearly superior suspense writers like Michael Connelly and George D. Shuman (18 Seconds).

The story, such as it is, begins with FBI special agent Nick Pellisante and his team staking out elusive mob boss Dominic “The Engineer” Cavello at his niece’s wedding. Shades of The Godfather, but Cavello is a completely repulsive character who gets his kicks from gunning down Pellisante’s fellow agents and, later, hiring a world-class assassin to blow up the bus transporting the jury that would have surely convicted him.

Five months after the disastrous first trial, Pellisante is on extended leave from the FBI, tortured over his inability to do anything about the bus explosion. He has also fallen hard for the sole surviving juror, an aspiring actress and single mother. A retrial gets underway, this time at a secure military installation with the jury sequestered. But Cavello once again slips away with the help of his goon for hire.

Patterson and his partner in literary crime apparently were not interested in creating any genuine moments of suspense. Here is what they did come up with: exotic Middle East and South American locations that are not vividly rendered, wooden dialogue, stiff characters, and a sexual liaison that is hardly surprising when the two characters make it into the sack.

I’m not familiar with any of Patterson’s earlier work aside from the two movies adapted from his Alex Cross series. Despite Morgan Freeman’s considerable skills, neither Kiss the Girls nor the especially awful Along Came a Spider prompted me to check out the source material. At least one longtime Patterson fan has voiced her extreme disappointment in both Judge & Jury and Beach Road. Patterson, she complained, is more concerned with quantity than quality. Sure enough, the writer plans to have published five novels before the end of the year, critics and ex-fans be damned.

After the recent death of pulp fiction legend Mickey Spillane, I went back and read his first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury. It is certainly no classic, but unlike Patterson and Gross, Spillane had a knack for colorful prose. His no-nonsense hero’s quest for vengeance had a lot more credibility, too.

The incomparable actor Joe Mantegna narrates the unabridged compact disc version of Judge & Jury. I wish I had opted for the audiobook, if only to discover how Mantegna was able to stretch this skimpy story out to an eight-hour running time.

421 pages, Little, Brown and Company. Available at bookstores, local libraries, and online booksellers.

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