(WOMEN'S MURDER CLUB #11): 11TH HOUR.

11th HOUR by JAMES PATTERSON & MAXINE PAETRO.

BACK COVER BLURB: Is one of Detective Lindsay Boxer’s colleagues a vicious killer? 
She won't know until the 11th hour…

A notorious drug dealer is gunned down using a weapon taken from the evidence locker in Lindsay’s own department!

Lindsay must investigate her closest colleagues. But who can she trust? 

And is she placing herself, and her unborn baby, in a deadly situation?

FIRST SENTENCE {PROLOGUE: REVENGE. ONE}: A good-looking man in his forties sat in the back row of the auditorium at the exclusive Morton Academy of Music.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {PAGE 119}: "Maggots, like all animals, are what they eat. If Jane here was poisoned or drugged, the tox screen on the milk shake would reveal that. So I put some squirmers into the blender and sent that out to the lab. Hoping for something, Linds, I was hoping for arsenic. Instead, we found benzoylecgonine, a metabolite of cocaine."

SOURCE: Ex-library stock.

READ FOR: What's In A Name? challenge: 'A title with a number in numbers' category (2nd book of 6) and Mount TBR challenge (8th book of 24).

MY THOUGHTS: Though book 11 of a series that I believe currently stands at sixteen novels I can't say I felt I'd missed anything by not having read any of the previous books. Indeed I found Detective Lindsay Boxer so irritating that I didn't feel inclined to know anything more of her. 

With what seems like books churned out every few months, I don't know if its merely a case of quantity over quality, a case of it being co-written OR whether its just a not-so- good novel as happens to the best of authors and especially during a long running series. One thing I do know though is, with their short, snappy chapters I normally turn to James Patterson's book when I want a quick, easy to read thriller, but this one alas this failed to hit the mark.

OK, so it is fiction and as such I expect certain liberties to be taken. And yes, I'm British and therefore perhaps used to slightly different procedures but surely no pregnant police detective (let alone one pregnant with what I gather was a 'high risk' pregnancy) would still be on such active service as to be involved in high speed car chases etc? 

Then there were the cases. Both rather mediocre, the perpetrator revealed rather early in one of them, the other easily guessed at. I don't know if its typical of this particular series to feature two cases but I'm afraid I didn't think the writing strong enough to support them both.

Not yet totally finished with the novels of James Patterson (though I'm rapidly beginning to understand why so many copies grace the shelves of the various charity shops)  but I rather think this may well be the first and last Women's Murder Club novel that I read.