Just Finished Reading James Patterson's The Thomas Berryman Number

Since I like to delve into mystery stories from time to time, and have reached the current limit of my favorite author of that genre...Sue Grafton...I decided to try another writer.  I picked James Patterson because of his popularity...I've read that he is the best-selling author today.  That in itself is no guarantee of quality, though, but at least his novels are at least worth looking into.  Several years ago, I do remember reading one of his Women's Murder Club mysteries (you know, the ones with numbers in their titles) but my memory of it is vague.  Patterson has well over 100 titles to his name, although many if not most of them are collaborations with other authors.  He is probably best known for his Alex Cross and that Women's Murder Club series, but I decided to start my Patterson readings with his very first published novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, from 1976...

The "number" in The Thomas Berryman Number is jargon for a hit job on the mentioned person, and Thomas Berryman is a hit man.  Which doesn't quite make sense, since it implies that the hit man is the target of a hit...which is an important twist in the story.  The main character, a middle-aged Tennessee journalist named Ochs Jones, is investigating the recent assassination of Jimmie Lee Horn, the first elected black mayor of Nashville.  Circumstances seem to indicate that one man was the shooter, but with tips he has received, Ochs starts to suspect someone else: a young man named Thomas Berryman.  It is his search for Berryman and the people he meets and experiences he collects along the way that make up the bulk of the story, along with flashbacks told from other characters' points of view, particularly Berryman's...

I liked The Thomas Berryman Number.  The plot was a little convoluted and the characters seemed a little stereotypical, but all in all it was a well told story with a sympathetic protagonist that held my attention and kept me in suspense until the end.  So now I'm on to the Alex Cross series, which Patterson began writing in the early 1990s with the first book, titled Along Came a Spider.  That one was made into a movie, so I might watch it after I finish reading the book, which I'm about 60% of the way through so far...