Hide & Seek is one of Patterson's stand-alone works.

A renowned singer suddenly finds herself incarcerated, accused of murdering her husband.

For two-thirds of the book, Maggie Bradford reveals to the reader the circumstances that led her to be sitting in jail.

Interwoven throughout is the story of the murdered husband, his background, and his deeply disturbing personality.

Although it may not be among my personal favorites, it remains a captivating read that offers a few surprises even for a jaded reader like myself.

The narrative keeps you engaged from start to finish, with Patterson's signature style of building suspense and keeping the reader on the edge of their seat.

Despite its flaws, Hide & Seek is a worthwhile addition to Patterson's extensive body of work and is sure to appeal to fans of the mystery and thriller genres.

A stand-alone thriller was published in 1995.

It received 4 stars.

When I began reading this book, the furthest thing from my mind was that I would rate it 4 stars. However, believe me, it truly deserves every single one of those stars.

Over the years, I haven't been one of JP's most enthusiastic admirers, so this book really took me aback.

It follows a typical JP format, with short chapters, plenty of pace, and intense tension. But what was unusual was that the book started off strongly and maintained that momentum throughout.

My typical experience with most of the JP books I've read in the past is that it doesn't take long before credibility is stretched and sentimentality takes over. But that's not the case here.

This is the story of Maggie Bradford, a thrice-married singing superstar and mother of two. We enter the story as Maggie sits in her prison cell, awaiting her trial for the murder of her third husband. For the police, the death of Maggie's latest husband is just one step too far. Three husbands and three deaths. Can coincidence be pushed to such an extent? The police don't think so.

So here we have Maggie in prison, writing her version of everything that has happened to her since the death of her first husband, and what a captivating tale it turns out to be.

Once again, I have to express how much I enjoyed this book and I have no hesitation in recommending it as a thrilling read.

Hide and Seek is my first encounter with the works of American author James Patterson.

This novel initially made a significant impression on me, but it didn't have the kind of grip that would keep me hooked until the very end.

Nonetheless, I can still assert that it is a page-turner. The drama and mystery it presents to the readers are vividly imaginable, but unfortunately, it stops right there.

The story revolves around a famous singer, Maggie Bradford. She had once killed her husband to protect herself from his scurrilous attacks. In the second part, she is accused of murdering her second husband, Will Shepard.

Given Maggie Bradford's history of killing her first husband to escape an abusive relationship, the speculation and accusations against her mount when she is again involved in a similar situation.

And during those tormenting moments, she enters the world of "Hide and Seek".

*Sorry for the spoiler*

Although I attempted to appreciate the verdict regarding Maggie Bradford, I don't believe she deserved it.

It is a good intention on the author's part to highlight domestic violence, but to have the victim charged guilty simply because she kept choosing the wrong type of husband seems rather unjust.

Moreover, James Patterson seems to have focused more on the background of the characters rather than the potentially awesome plot.

It could have been a much better novel if more attention had been given to the plot development.

It really could have.

Within just a few pages, it becomes crystal clear why James Patterson has sold an astronomical number of books. His storytelling style is refreshingly simple, and there's absolutely nothing amiss with that. The action unfolds with remarkable fluidity, keeping the reader engaged from start to finish.

Hide and Seek is only the second book by Patterson that I've had the pleasure of reading, but it's evident that he adheres to a formula that works. And why wouldn't he? Some of his works have been successfully adapted for the big screen, and perhaps after the resounding success of his Alex Cross novels, he discovered a winning blueprint. He has consistently found a way to give his readers exactly what they desire. To me, this is a true skill. If I were in his shoes as a writer, I would do the same.

For some inexplicable reason, authors don't seem to enjoy the same freedom as musicians or filmmakers when it comes to telling stories. By freedom, I mean the absence of a certain type of snobbery that seems to pervade the literary world. Authors often face criticism for writing anything that has even a hint of mass appeal. In a way, I might have been initially put off by Patterson's astronomical sales figures. I'm not entirely sure, but it could be because I'm aware of the dismal statistics regarding reading, especially among certain age groups and demographics. This might have led me to be skeptical of a book that has been read so widely. However, I'm actively trying to shed this attitude, and reading Hide and Seek is a step in that direction.

Ultimately, I firmly believe that reading is of utmost importance. It shouldn't be regarded as a pastime reserved solely for the intelligent. People shouldn't look down on others for reading something from the "popcorn" aisle. So what if it's entertainment? Each to their own. Who has the right to judge?

The lead character in this story, Maggie Bradford, a world-famous singer accused of killing two of her husbands, is a likeable protagonist. Patterson does a commendable job of presenting a female lead without it feeling forced or contrived. This, for me, is the most skillful aspect of the story. My favorite character, however, is Maggie's second husband, Will Shepherd. A former Premiership superstar striker who transitions into a Hollywood film star when his football career is prematurely cut short, we witness his gradual descent into madness. He would be a complex character to portray as an actor.

Could I have cared more deeply for the characters? Perhaps. But it wasn't a burden to reach the end, and the ending had a satisfying twist. The short chapters, which might deter some readers, actually had the opposite effect on me, making me eager to read on. Maybe I'm biased on this point, as short chapters are a characteristic of my own writing style. Hey, if it works for the multi-million-selling Patterson...

Hide and Seek was first published in 1988, but it doesn't strike me as overly dated. I have one more James Patterson book on my shelf to read, but after that, I highly doubt I'll be delving into more of his works in search of something new. However, if a non-reader were to approach me and ask where they should begin their foray into fiction, I would gladly recommend this book to them, as I don't think they would struggle to finish it.

On page 78, it is written, "Don't, leave me in such terrible suspense."

On page 265, it states that she is not as sweet as her voice, not as alluring as her melodies, and not as compassionate as her lyrics.

On page 340, Hardy-bar laughed at his Hootie joke.

Man, I was really excited for the courtroom scenes. As far as I can remember, I've never read one from Mr Patterson before. However, to my disappointment, it was right at the rear end of the book. It would have been great if the courtroom scenes were more prominent and spread throughout the story. Maybe then, I could have been more engaged and on the edge of my seat. But still, I'm looking forward to seeing how the story unfolds and what other surprises Mr Patterson has in store for us.

Terribly flat dialogue and unrealistic situations.

The characters in this story were as cardboard as can be.

The heroine was not only unlikable but also stupid.

Patterson really should refrain from attempting to write a female main character.

At just 6% into the book, our heroine gives this rather odd description of herself.

"I glanced at my own reflection in the cab's window. Very long, blond hair, mostly with a mind of its own, but my best physical attribute, I thought. Freckles that no amount of makeup would ever cover. Nose a little out of proportion. Brown eyes that had, I knew, regained at least some of their half-forgotten sparkle. A small mouth, thickish lips - made, as Phillip joked in the happy days, for fellatio."

I managed to finish this only because I had committed to reading it for a group reading activity.

Honestly, being tortured on the rack would have been an easier experience.

"Hide and Seek" has since been deleted from my Kindle - permanently.

The hardcovers that I had previously picked up at the $1 per book library sale are sitting by the door in a box - ready to be donated back to the library for some other unfortunate soul to pick up.

The author seems to have a very low opinion of women and, in my opinion, is a total ass!

Nuff said.....

Maggie Bradford is a renowned singer and songwriter.

Many of her songs are deeply rooted in the pain and heartbreak she endured when she was forced to kill her abusive husband to protect herself and their daughter Jennie.

Years pass, and Maggie finds herself falling for the famous soccer player Will Fletcher. However, unbeknownst to her, Will is a psychopath who has a dark past of his own, having killed before.

Tragedy strikes again when Maggie discovers Will with Jennie outside her home and shoots him. Now, she must face a trial for killing her second husband.

I vividly remember reading this book when it was first released 20 years ago. The title rings a bell, but the details of the story have faded from my memory. Patterson, the author, cleverly weaves in some major twists near the end of the book, completely catching me off guard. I had no inkling of the unexpected ending.

It's interesting how time can distort our recollection of a story, yet the overall impact still lingers. This book seems to have left a lasting impression on me, even if the specific plot points are a bit hazy.

Perhaps a reread would help jog my memory and allow me to fully appreciate the complexity of the story once again.

*Minor, inconsequential spoilers present*
For approximately the first 250 pages of this book, it was dreadfully disappointing. It contained a few steamy sex scenes, an unappealing, rapey man with Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), and an irritating narrator who seemed bent on telling her woeful tale about how burdensome celebrity status is and how full of hardships it is. Idiots.
It commences as the journal of the aforementioned annoying narrator. Apparently, she has been convicted of murdering her celebrity husband and is penning down her side of the story to appeal to us, the readers, as to whether she is truly at fault. If it had been any standard thriller writer (I'm looking at you, Galbraith...), I would have assumed that she was definitely not guilty and would have spent about a third of the book proving precisely that to us. However, with J. Patterson as the author, things are not as they seem.
It alternates between the journal and a third-person account of a certain Will Shepherd, a fictional American football (or as the Americans would have it, soccer) striker, and soon (150 pages later) to be the husband of our annoying narrator. He suffers from MPD, just like Gary Murphy/Soneji in Along came a Spider, I'll state that outright. No secrets. It is revealed relatively early in the book. One side is the normal cool guy, and the other is impulsively violent, constantly rapey, and insatiably horny. The annoying narrator, Maggie Bradford, has also gone a bit crazy after having to kill her first drunkard husband, Phillip. His ghost still haunts her, for which reason she writes songs about her life and attempts to sing them (in an uncanny resemblance to Taylor Swift). She meets Barry Kahn, a fictional songwriting guru, who decides to train her. Soon enough, she is in Hollywood, living her dreams.
She finds love in Patrick O'Malley, a wealthy entrepreneur who has just lost his wife, and they have a child, Allie. She thus has two children, one from Phillip and the other from Patrick. She never gets the chance to marry him. He dies of a heart attack on his yacht.
Enter Will, now all grown up and a fan of our annoying narrator. I have deliberately avoided his history due to spoilers, by the way. They meet, fall in love, and marry. Will grows restless, and then finally the exciting part begins, about which I shall remain silent. Before this, you have Will being violent, Will being a stud, Will raping women, Will engaging in BDSM with women, and Will bleeding women to death and drinking their blood with tequila. Quite cheerful stuff, that! I don't know, was this meant to be disturbing? For I felt nothing. Only a minor repulsion towards the character who was extremely crazy and one-dimensional.
The plot is slow for the majority of the novel and picks up pace far too late for redemption. However, by the end, there is a stomach-churning twist, and I was left satisfied. The use of prose was appreciable, with the narration being done well. The two faults that let it down are the pace of the story and the flat characters. A better way, in my humble opinion, to present the facts would have been through Norma's eyes, her investigation piecing the story in reverse, and alternating between Will's misadventures, as they are written, and Maggie's journal, up to the day of the crime.
This is an okay book, mostly, and a good book by the end. However, fans of ACAS will be left slightly disappointed.

I am currently reviewing the book "Hide And Seek" by James Patterson.

This is an outstanding thriller that I purchased from a local secondhand bookstore. It is a standalone thriller and one of Patterson's finest works.

The plot centers around a successful country and western singer. She has been married twice, and it appears that she has shot both husbands. In the first instance, her husband was on a coke high and was ransacking the house, seeking her and her daughter with the intention of killing them. Fortunately, that situation was resolved. However, years later, she has another abusive husband, and she can't recall if she shot him or not.

An overzealous district attorney and some policemen who are not interested in uncovering the truth take her to court for murder. The second husband was a successful soccer star who transitioned to acting and was having an affair with the actress in the movie.

I believe the story suggests that his wife may suffer from battered wife syndrome, unconsciously falling for abusive men. With the second husband, he was sexually molesting his stepdaughter, which the prosecution claims led to her murdering him. He also physically abused his wife, slept around, and malevolently kept asking for forgiveness.

The story has a great and shocking ending that keeps your interest throughout. It is a thrilling read that I would highly recommend.

Ehhhhh... it was ok.

This simple statement seems to convey a rather neutral sentiment. It could imply that the experience or thing being described was neither overly good nor bad.

Maybe it met the basic requirements but didn't really stand out or exceed expectations.

It might have been an average encounter, a mediocre performance, or a so-so outcome.

However, the brevity of the expression also leaves room for interpretation.

It could potentially hide a more complex or nuanced feeling that the speaker is not fully expressing.

Perhaps there were aspects that they liked or disliked, but they chose to simply sum it up as "ok" for the sake of simplicity.

Overall, "ehhhh... it was ok" is a somewhat ambiguous statement that can mean different things depending on the context and the person using it.

1.5 stars.

1 star because this is, in fact, a book. There are words on the page. The extra ½ star is because I was mildly interested in how or why Maggie killed all those husbands and there was some intrigue at the end.

Let’s start with the positives:
1. The font was big, so it was a fast read.
2. The chapters are short, which compels you to keep reading.

The negatives, in no particular order:
1. The juvenile writing. This book feels like a horny teenager wrote it. The sentences are crammed with so many adjectives that it feels clunky to read and the writing style trivializes the horrific things Will Shepherd does to women. It’s hard to feel tension when there is no buildup. I’m not saying I want a play-by-play of Will assaulting the women, because I don’t, but those scenes are very tell, and not show.

2. It’s not just the scenes with Will, the whole book is tell, not show. We are led to believe that Maggie is a huge singing star, but we don’t feel that reality. On page 277, we learn “I’d sold close to twenty million albums; I’d won eleven Grammy Awards.” At the beginning of the book, she’s a nobody, and then, about 12 chapters in, she’s a somebody, but we don’t get to go on that journey with her. I know it isn’t the point of the book, but it would have been nice to ground us in her reality a little more.

3. SPOILER: Will’s desire to hurt women comes up when he feels that he isn’t the best in the world. I’m sure that people like this exist, but the writing is so sub-par, that each one of these interactions makes me mad rather than scared, horrified, thrilled(?). Egomania can be the motivation, but Will is such a two-dimensional villain that I didn’t find it a compelling enough reason to care. Example: he’s been having an affair with the leading lady in a movie he’s also starring in, and at the end of the shoot she tells him that it’s over, it was just a fling. This man’s ego is so fragile, he decides to bleed her almost to death because he isn’t the best sex she’s ever had.

“I go back to California, you become Mr. Maggie Bradford, just like you were.”
Will blinked. The words stung. “And what we had out here?” he asked Suzanne.
“We had some fine times, didn’t we? You’re good, Will. One of the best.”
…”Oh sweetheart. I’ve had the best! Actors, other athletes, ski bums. But you are very good. No worry there”
He could feel ancient demons…Jesus he hated to lose. He couldn’t bear failure. (233-234).

4. Will Shepherd goes to live with his aunts in England after his father’s death. When we meet them, it isn’t specified if these aunts are sisters with each other (and his mother), or if they are lesbians, or what the living arrangement is. I say this because the vagueness can only lead me to assume that…SPOILER: Will has sex with his biological aunt. We finally get clarification in Chapter 96. This aunt is introduced in Chapter 6. One sentence in chapter 6 would have been helpful to contextualize the scenario and his warped relationship with women.

5. Maggie Bradford is so self-conscious about her height. She is described as 5 ft 8 in tall at one point and she goes out of her way to mention what a freak she is at least six times. “I was dressed in my usual outfit: a loose white peasant’s blouse, long skirt, flat shoes, so I wouldn’t be a millimeter taller than I was” (273). A giant of a woman! An abomination!

6. This passage:

“He was there with his wife, an ordinary-looking woman who wore huge, oval-rimmed glasses and no makeup. I remember wondering why so attractive a man would marry this woman, but when we got a chance to talk, I liked her a lot. The Nizhinskis told me they were both fans. Hoopty-doo” (328).

a. Maggie demeans this woman because she doesn’t wear makeup and therefore doesn’t conform to the stereotype of womanhood that society demands. But Maggie herself shuns fancy parties and showiness in favor of raw emotion and realism in her music. So why the judgement, hmm?

b. The phrase “hoopty-doo.” Has anyone ever said this out loud? She also says things like “hooo boy” (50, 398) and “Hooo boy, hoo boy, hooo boy” (65).

7. The descriptions of a side character, Norma Breen. “And it was Bailford who came up to her as she hefted her slightly overweight body out of her car” (314).

Hefted. This other woman carries an “extra twenty pounds” so “a lot of men were overlooking her” (345). So she’s maybe a size 8 or 10? A freak! An abomination!

8. Toward the end, SPOILER: when Will comes back to the house and Maggie finds him in Jennie’s room, Maggie chases him into the front yard with the gun he bought. He attacks her and beats her so hard she breaks multiple ribs (or so she says). She passes out and the gun goes off. Next thing we know, she’s waking up in her bed, bruised and battered, and a cop tells her she’s under arrest for murder. Now, one would think, the fact that she’s beaten within an inch of her life matters, but it doesn’t. It never comes up again. The only explanation I can think of is that Patterson forgot that Maggie had some recourse for self-defense in favor of introducing a twist in the third act.

9. While no women explicitly “breast boobily,” I submit that Will “dicks cockily.”

10. Will describing himself as the “werewolf of insert location” every time he went looking for a woman to assault.

If you liked this book, then more power to you, but I won’t be taking any more James Patterson novels out of the Little Free Library in my neighborhood.

So many twists and turns!

I was truly not ready for that ending!!!

The way the chapters are laid out is just amazing.

It keeps you on the edge of your seat, constantly guessing what will happen next.

Each chapter builds upon the previous one, creating a seamless and engaging narrative.

The author has done a great job of developing the characters and their relationships, making you care about what happens to them.

This is a very good read that I would highly recommend to anyone who loves a good mystery or thriller.

Once you start reading, you won't be able to put it down!

It's a page-turner that will keep you entertained from beginning to end.

Overall, I give this book a big thumbs up!