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Ladies, start your engines!
The Women's Murder Club, which was introduced to legions of new fans in 1st To Die, is an intelligent, plausible, and modern idea whose time has truly arrived. It is also appealingly warm and cute without being the least bit trite, silly, or cloying. Lindsay Boxer, a police lieutenant in charge of San Francisco's homicide division, Cindy Thomas, the lead crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Jill Bernhardt, an assistant DA, and Claire Washburn, the Chief Medical Examiner, are four sharp, rising professionals in the field of law enforcement. They have broken the proverbial male glass ceiling and discovered the synergy of brainstorming their way to a solution of their mutual problems.
In 2nd Chance, our ladies are confronted with the brutal attacks of a serial mass murderer called "Chimera" who seems to be targeting black police officers and their families. While the thriller part of the novel is not pedestrian, it is also not the compelling, unique creative stuff that will draw gasps of shock and awe from every reader. What Patterson has done very well indeed is to put the apprehension of a dangerous psychopath into the format of an exceptionally well-crafted realistic police procedural. This includes both the formal internal workings of the San Francisco Police Department and the external informal deliberations of the four chums, aka The Women's Murder Club. There is more than enough of the stuff we've all come to expect - shoot-em-ups, twists and turns, red herrings - to keep the pages turning at a goodly clip! And the final climactic takedown of a sniper holed up in the bell tower overlooking the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto is a real heart stopper!
What lifts this particular tale from the realm of an ordinary thriller to the level of a much more thought-provoking novel is the realistic way in which the personal lives of the four ladies intrude on their professional lives (or perhaps vice-versa?). Jill Bernhardt deals with pregnancy and the loss of her baby by miscarriage. While she struggles with maintaining the personal detachment necessary to write a newspaper article, Cindy finds herself falling rather heavily for the pastor of the church that was the site of the first murder. And Lindsay struggles with the emotional trauma of meeting her ex-cop father who ran out on their family over 20 years earlier.
Patterson has also presented us with some very interesting philosophical discussion on the extent to which policemen have to tread that tightrope line between the law and the criminal. The concept of the "blue wall of silence" forms a chilling part of the killer's ultimate motivation and certainly stopped me in my tracks while reading. The unanswered question that the Chief of the SFPD asks in the final few paragraphs revolves around this same question and provides an exceptional ending to a fine addition to Patterson's continually growing body of work.
2nd Chance is an exciting, well-paced thriller that includes a good plot, great characters, realism, and just the right amount of hope that the third installment in the series will tell us more about the personal stories of these new heroines on the literary scene.
Paul Weiss
