Ponder Post: 2nd Chance

James Patterson's second book in his Women's Murder Club series is titled 2nd Chance. I read the first book, 1st to Die, just a few weeks ago and posted a review on it July 13, 2015. 2nd Chance focused on a series of murders with no seeming correlation among the victims... a young girl, an old woman, a middle aged man, an older man. Only blacks were murdered, and so racial discrimination as a motive was considered highly probable. Subsequent disclosure of self-contradictory clues kept the investigation oscillating between support or dismissal of a hate crime theory. I found the hate crime scenario distasteful. Even though murder is hardly palatable in general, it bothers me more when the victims are so innocent. It may be perverse, but I like it better when the victims have a personal connection to the murderer, when they are somewhat nasty or dishonest, or when, to some extent "they had it coming".

In a murder mystery, I like to sleuth along with the detective and prefer having a fighting chance of identifying the killer before he is revealed. This mystery was not really soluble until nearly the end; however, I do acknowledge that in real life, police would rarely get all the clues up front either. A reassuring aspect of a book series is that the cast of characters is familiar. As second in the series, 2nd Chance had some redeeming features in that I did not need to learn an entire new suite of names, skills, and personalities since many of them had been introduced in 1st to Die.

One thing I do like about a TV or book series is that there is often an over-arching storyline, usually a back story about one of the key characters. The main San Francisco police detective Lindsay Boxer is confronted with the reappearance of a very key person from her past and it was that plot line that interested me more than the series of murders. In that respect this book series reminds me more and more of the Castle TV series and there are many parallels between the main characters in it and those in the James Patterson's Women's Murder Club series. In Castle there is a mysterious relationship between Rick Castle (Nathan Fillion) and his father (James Brolin).

Hmmm, I wonder. Does James Patterson gets some royalties from the TV series? Mostly because I like the TV series so much, I will continue reading subsequent novels in this book series. They may not be stellar, but I am not quite ready to give up on them yet.