Richard North Patterson

As a novel The Devils Light is crudely done, a failure, but Richard North Patterson may have had reasons other than literary for putting out such a work. The basic story about how the CIA saves the world from a planned H bomb attack by al Qaeda could have come directly out of a CIA briefing. More attention is paid to this book when viewed as successful propaganda for the CIA. I am a CIA skeptic but Patterson does raise the question of how will the U.S. defend itself from terrorists and who show more will be doing it. The September 11. 2011 bombing of the World Trade Towers is an important element in the story told and presents the unintended irony of the very organization who played its large part in the profound intelligence failure that lead to the bombing and deaths is now in fantasy going to save us all from the same terrorists. As for gaining better rounded insights into spying I would trust John le Carre.

Quotes: (page 359) “Brooke said nothing of his own grief. There would be time for that, in his own private way. He had never believed that a single moment could redefine one's nature. Now al Qaeda had made the life he had planned seem shallow. Perhaps, at last, he understood Anit Rahal.”

(page 513) “'We're sworn never to disclose the details of our work.
That means just not you, but family or friends. If I'm involved with an Israeli man, no matter how well I deceive him, after three months I must report it. Better to have no relationships at all, unless it's inside Mossad.' Her voice gained intensity, as though against her will, she was feeling a surge of repressed emotion. 'The ideal agent is a loner who's willing to give up her life and disappear at will. In fact, the best of us are arguably insane---fanatic patriots with a pathological gift for deceiving others. Not to mention becoming someone else.'” show less

I consider RNP one of the masters of the character-driven thriller. Here, he gets away from the politics of his last few books and takes us to a small college campus (a particularly compelling venue for me). Mark Darrow is being called back to the place where he found himself, Caldwell College. The current president is caught up in an embezzlement scandal, and Darrow, now a corporate lawyer, is being asked to take his place.

It’s not exactly a happy reunion. Darrow has had his share of show more personal tragedy, and returning to campus brings back the memories of an awful murder that his best friend was convicted of. He is supposed to be devoting his time to pulling the college out of its doldrums, but instead he can’t stop himself from trying to prove his friend’s innocence. And along the way, well, he just happens to fall in love with his mentor’s daughter.

I like how RNP gives every character a secret. No one is black and white, even the most minor character. The story does turn out to be a little predictable… I realized who the bad guy was going to be almost immediately, and the final confrontation is a giant cliché that you expect as soon as the location is declared. But all of that doesn’t take away from another winning story. show less

This murder mystery is a combination mystery and family drama. The mystery is pretty good, but the family drama component, while well conceived, caused the narrative to drag at crucial moments, I found.

Also, Patterson has, at least in this book, two narrative tics that I found increasingly distracting. First, the adverb "utterly," which should probably never be used, is used here too frequently. Characters stand "utterly still," or the night is "utterly quiet." Once during a novel, OK. show more Twice, perhaps. More than that is utterly too much. But worse, many, many times during the novel, at least two dozen, the protagonist realizes things, or impressions come to her, "all at once." As in, "All at once, Caroline realized that this girl was looking at life in a new way." "All at once, it came to Caroline that the prosecutor knew no more than she did about . . . " That sort of stuff drives me nuts and drains away my ability to enjoy a book.

The mystery and even the characters were interesting, although I must say I had the ending pegged pretty early on. Overall, for me, an OK murder myster. For my taste, Patterson needed to tighten up the flashbacks and tidy up those cliches. Hard core mystery genre buffs may be more forgiving than I of these flaws, though. show less

A friend whose opinions on books I greatly admire, recommended Richard North Patterson to me. At first I thought he meant James Patterson because I had never heard of Richard North Patterson, but my friend said he had tried one of his books and ended up reading five of them. I went online to see if my local library had any of his books, and I ran across this one. I really enjoyed “Trial,” both the quality of the writing and the engrossing plot. I’m not a huge reader of fiction. I often show more find novels way too long and not particularly intriguing. “Trial,” at nearly 600 pages flew by like a 200 page novel because of its clever yet fully believable plot. Much of the book highlights the political times we find ourselves in, and my guess is most, if not all of the one and two star reviews on Amazon are by conservatives who haven’t read one page of “Trial,” yet feel qualified to condemn it. My guess is the one word most of those reviews have in common is “woke.” show less