Women's Murder Club vs August Spies!

"The Women's Murder Club", introduced to legions of new fans in "1st To Die" and continued to wonderful effect in "2nd Chance", is an intelligent, plausible, modern idea whose time has come. Lindsay Boxer, a police lieutenant in charge of San Francisco's homicide division, Cindy Thomas, lead crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Jill Bernhardt, assistant DA and Claire Washburn, Chief Medical Examiner, are four sharp, rising professionals in the field of law enforcement who have broken the proverbial male glass ceiling and have discovered the synergy of brainstorming their way to a solution of their mutual problems.

In "3rd Degree", the high speed action starts from the very first page as our ladies are confronted with the brutal terrorist attacks of an out-of-time 60s fringe group of misguided Berkley radicals targeting what they would label stereotypical mega-rich corporate robber barons and their families - better known to the rest of the world as millionaires. With the puffed up rhetoric of the far, far left, they take credit for one of their attacks with a note signing themselves as "August Spies":

"We have declared war on the agents of greed and corruption in our society. No longer can we sit back and tolerate the powered class, whose only birthright is arrogance, as they enrich themselves on the oppressed, the weak, and the poor."

The thriller part of the novel is a well crafted and nicely paced police procedural that takes us through vignettes involving forensics, profiling, post mortems, cooperation between the LA municipal police force and the FBI, the plodding details of policing at street level, and even the moral dilemma posed by the tragic requirement to withhold details of an investigation when this action may place the public in harm's way! The solution is both satisfying and credible and even the bad guys are well-developed characters that come alive off the page with their twisted motivation and hatred of the world around them.

As he did so well in "2nd Chance", Patterson continues to lift his tale above the realm of ordinary thriller by realistically allowing the personal lives of the four ladies to intrude on their professional lives (or is that vice-versa?). Lindsay falls hard for a professional colleague, Director of Homeland Security, Joe Molinari, whose base of operations is clear across the country in Washington and Jill struggles with the emotional roller coaster of a husband's abuse that has recently escalated into the physical after she lost her baby by miscarriage in "2nd Chance". (I was, however, more than a little miffed to discover that the church pastor Cindy fell in love with in "2nd Chance" and Lindsay's ex-cop father, both of whom seemed to hold out so much promise for future sub-plots and character development were simply ignored in "3rd Degree" - sigh!) Patterson even took the brutal hard-core step of killing off one of his ladies as part of the action (a calculated writer's risk, to be sure, that we'll all hope doesn't back-fire in novels to come)!

Well done! I’ll be out looking for #4 in the series shortly!

Paul Weiss
[also published today on Amazon]
[modified slightly for Epinions]