I'd had a reasonably tough weekend camping and when I got back I just wanted to relax. I've been watching episodes of a tv show called Castle so I was in a crime kind of mood. And so I picked up Worst Case by James Patterson.
It's not a bad book. It's not the first James Patterson I've read, though the others were all from his Maximum Ride series so it's the first crime novel. At the middle point of the Maximum Ride series he seems to have got environmentally conscious and this is carried on here.
The book follows police Detective Michael Bennett as he follows a case where rich teenagers are kidnapped and made to answer questions about the environment and world affairs. If they get too many wrong, they get shot. Backing him up is FBI agent Emily Parker. Both are single parents, both are good at their jobs so there's some nice chemistry between them.
Now this book is in the middle of a series so I don't think I have the full picture about his life. You learn the basics but there's still more hinted at. Which is perfectly natural and expected. Yet it all seems slightly hollow. You see the surfaced of everything but none of the emotion underneath.
There's another thing. They don't seem to spend that much time working on the case. At the end you see them working with fingerprints and stuff but before they just don't seem to care that much. Bennett spends a fair amount of his time with his kids, while not seeming too concerned about the case and Parker goes shopping at one point. They get a description of the person they're trying to find and then seem to leave it on a desk or something as nothing happens after that.
They do eventually catch up with the criminal, after he's left a trail of bodies behind him. To be honest I was kind of rooting for him. He had everything planned out so well and his intentions were sort of honourable. And the police seemed so inept. It was only at the last, and I truly mean last, moment that they managed to work out what he was doing and how all his victims were connected. At times you see things from the criminal's perspective so maybe I'm being too harsh, as the reader would naturally know more. But really, he was beaten by luck more than anything else.
However it was, all in all, a good book. You should probably read the preceding books in the series first, as I think you get a better idea of who Detective Bennett is as a person. But as it is it's still a good read if you want to just sit and admire the blood patterns for a while. I've included the Amazon link below, as I've only just thought of doing that. And in a rating out of 10? I say I'd give it a six.
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