THE 20TH VICTIM
James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
Little, Brown and Company
ISBN
Hardcover
Thriller, Mystery

THE 20TH VICTIM by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro is by remarkable coincidence an anniversary of sorts, that being the twentieth novel featuring the quartet which has come to be known as the Women’s Murder Club. It would be easy at this point for Patterson and Paetro to perform the literary equivalent of phoning these installments into the legions of fans. The authors have, I am happy to say, done anything but. THE 20TH VICTIM contains a number of surprises and changeups in the manner of its nineteen predecessors and the readers of this latest installment will be the richer for it.

THE 20TH VICTIM starts strongly and never lets up. The initial case involves a traffic stop which goes very badly when the passenger in the stopped car shoots and kills the investigating police officer. The unidentified shooter flees, leaving the hapless driver --- a patsy named Clay Warren behind in a stolen car loaded with drugs. Warren could help himself by identifying the shooter and thus aiding in his apprehension. Warren, however, is terrified of retaliation if he does so. Yuki Castellano, a San Francisco assistant district attorney and a member of the Women’s Murder Club, is tasked with bringing Warren to trial but is aware that he was ultimately in the wrong place at the wrong time and that justice would be better served if the doer were identified and apprehended. Meanwhile, San Francisco Police Homicide detective Lindsay Boxer is dealing with an extremely interesting series of murders. The first involves a retired sports figure who is killed execution-style at a fast-food restaurant. The second concerns a prominent music producer and his wife who are taken out in their home by a sniper. It develops that the victims in both instances were dealing drugs. No one is more surprised than Boxer and her law enforcement partner Rick Conklin when they discover that other high profile drug dealers were killed at the same time in different parts of the United States. As the killings continue, Boxer and Conklin discover an organized group that appears to be dedicated to vigilante action against the drug dealers, as well as an ex-Special ops team member who appears to be responsible for the killings in the Bay area. Finding him, however, is another problem, one which is fraught with danger as it dovetails indirectly with another plotline in the book.. The most interesting case in THE 20TH VICTIM, however, involves Lindsay Boxer’s husband Joe Molinari. Joe is contacted by an old friend who strongly believes that his father, an elderly man with health problems, was murdered by his treating physician while receiving inpatient hospital treatment. There is no real evidence of this, but Joe’s friend is certain that it occurred and is bound and determined to obtain justice and/or revenge in no particular order. It is revealed that the doctor has lost other patients as well, but Joe has a reason, unfortunately, to suspect that his friend might be guilty of the very crime of which he is accusing the doctor. It’s a simple issue with a complex set of facts, well presented, and a bit of an unexpected spinoff which makes THE 20TH VICTIM worth reading all by itself.

The Women’s Murder Club is one of those rare long-running series that improbably gets better with age. Patterson and Paetro continue to make a terrific collaborative team and their names together on any book cover constitutes a guarantee that what awaits within is worth buying and reading. This is particularly true of THE 20TH VICTIM. Recommended.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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