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.

Ponder Post: Lighthouse Bay

Lighthouse Bay, a novel by Kimberley Freeman, takes place in an Australian seaside town. It tells the tale with a completely different set of characters in two distinct time periods, one in 1901 and one in 2011. The chapters randomly flit back and forth from one era with its set of characters to the other.

I found the 1901 tale of a shipwreck and the mystery of its possible survivor the better of the two stories – and two stories it was. The main characters are two supposedly strong women and most certainly they endured some heart-breaking tragedies such as the loss of a child and the loss of a lover. But, each of these women was filled with such self-doubts and angst that I found the purported portrayal of strength not credible enough for my taste. The concept of jewelry design as a skill outlet for these pseudo career women was a weak common theme, and seemed somewhat stereotypically sexist to me.

The concrete connection between the two eras was not revealed until the final pages of the book unless you count geography as being a suitable link. This is definitely "chick lit" certainly not at its insipid worst but surely not at its admirable finest either. Instead of breezing through Lighthouse Bay as a light and refreshing read, I found myself trudging through the pages as if I myself were dragging my feet through sand. I was captive on an airplane so I listlessly continued going through the motions of turning the pages. Amazon gave this book 4½ stars but I would grudgingly give it only 2.