2nd Chance is the second book in a new series by Patterson.
This one follows a homicide detective in San Francisco.
And she's a woman, and single, but has three female friends who called themselves informally the Women's Murder Club, and since the other three are professionally related (a crime reporter, the medical examiner and an assistant district attorney), that's credible.
I don't recall seeing them actually help Lindsay solve the crime while they're sitting around the restaurant eating and drinking, but maybe that's just because I was distracted by their personal lives.
Patterson's formula is to combine dramatic violence with continuing soap opera personal lives of the continuing characters, and he's obviously just getting started.
Lindsay's father shows up after leaving his family twenty years ago.
One woman has a miscarriage.
Another starts dating the minister present at the first shooting.
Lindsay's father does at least play a role in the investigation, both because he knew one of the suspects when he was still a policeman himself, and by watching Lindsay's back.
Still, I found it impossible to get too choked up over him.
I mean, this world is full of a lot worse things than men leaving their families, and so I just didn't spend time weeping and wanting to give poor Lindsay a hug, like her friends.
That's just to say she spends a little too much time feeling sorry for herself, and in introversion.
At the end she writes about what it means that she usually faces the killer alone.
How about that Patterson knows his readers want one good guy to do everything, instead of following actual police procedure? I will admit that the mystery fooled me.
I missed the clue just as Lindsay did (at first).
I was thinking it might be her father, and how she was going to react to that.
So when she realized the truth, I was as surprised as everyone else.
I'd overlooked him.
I did know of course that her big suspect couldn't be the killer, but that's because, unlike her, I could tell from the number of pages that I wasn't close enough yet to the end of the book.
She didn't have that advantage.
One thing that puzzled me was how she resisted labeling the crimes as political correctness hate crimes even though all the victims were black.
Her belief that there was a deeper connection between the victims than race was correct of course.
But is it so impossible to say that crimes can be hate crimes and yet have deeper reasons as well.
The killer did turn out to have racial motives, though their basis was personal as well.
Is it politically incorrect for a killer to have such motives combined? Maybe in today's mixed up world, yet.
Anyway, I have to admit I enjoyed this novel more than most of Patterson's recent novels.
They're designed to be flashy rather than solid, but they're brilliantly flashy.