It looks like James Patterson has decided to move into the private detective field, with this initial novel about Jack Morgan and his high tech private security company’s agents and their adventures.
It’s hard not to see parallel with the established Alex Cross novels. Jack Morgan is introduced escorting a famous movie actress to the Oscars, but gets a phone call that an old friend and lover has been murdered. Is there any Alex Cross novel that doesn’t begin with him receiving a telephone call taking him from a family gathering? And many of the murders involve old friends and lovers if not actual relatives.
It’s also interesting to see how Patterson has written differently than the old DKA novels. These cases seem to be serious, but are so far over the top that they become cartoonish.
His old friend and lover is found murdered, and so his best friend (her husband) wants the killer found.
His uncle just happens to own a major league football team, and he and other owners have discovered some odd games results that indicate cheating, and so Morgan is hired to find and stop it, before it becomes public knowledge.
And a serial killer is out there murdering teenage girls by a bewildering array of MOs. Thanks goodness for his dedicated agents and his high tech equipment that makes the FBI’s look behind the times.
It’s all too much. I haven’t even mentioned the Morgan is a veteran haunted by nightmares of something that happened during the war, so we’re supposed to get all involved in that.
But there’s just too much else going on.
Oh yes, plus he’s sleeping with his secretary and though he cares for her, we’re supposed to get all misty eyed about his angst that he’s not prepared to marry her although she wants that.
And oh yes, in place of Alex Cross getting phone messages from a killer, Morgan gets phone messages telling him that he’s dead.
And oh yes, his twin brother is in trouble with the Mafia for unpaid gambling debts, so Morgan pays them and sends him to rehab, apparently for his gambling addiction (does that require a live-in clinic), but at the end turns on Jack and decides to go into head to head professional competition with Morgan.
And the money to do all this with came from their criminal father who died in jail.
There’s enough material here for three or four good novels, but Patterson likes to present it in bright globs of emotion, short chapters that are like flares in the night, suggesting more than they tell.
Somehow, he forget to throw in the kitchen sink. Maybe that will be in the next novel.
Private by James Patterson - New Detective Series
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