Just Finished Reading James Patterson's Season of the Machete

Since this is my third consecutive review of a James Patterson novel, you just might come to the conclusion that I have totally immersed myself in this popular mystery/crime writer's works...but you'd be wrong.  Especially after I just finished his second published novel, titled Season of the Machete...

Season of the Machete is a thrown-together conglomeration of all sorts of cynical literary and cinematic themes that have worn themselves thin.  The story takes place in a foreign country (a small Caribbean nation with a Jamaican culture but not Jamaica per se) and the CIA and American organized crime bosses are in cahoots as they try to manipulate the politics of that country to their mutual advantage.  To this end, they agree to hire assassins (in the form of a married couple dedicated to the profession) to create a scenario of fear and unrest through a series of brutal murders that appear to have been committed by revolutionaries on the island.  But one man...our protagonist...has seen the hit man at a murder site and the hunt is on...who'll catch him first...or will he catch one of the culprits?  If this sounds like a scenario from the Robert Redford movie Three Days of the Condor (released in 1975, two years before this book's publication), don't be surprised: Patterson even made a thinly-disguised reference to the movie...

If you like repeated gory scenes of brutality and killing interspersed with double crosses gone out of control, along with no one ever being quite sure who is the hunter and who is the hunted...then this is the story for you.  I found it to be altogether tedious...I began to wish for a giant asteroid collision to happen at the end, just to put all of these pathetic and unlikable people out of their misery...

In other words, I don't recommend Season of the Machete.  But it is short enough to where you wouldn't be making much of a reading commitment should you decide to ignore my advice and tackle it anyway...

I think I'll take a little break from James Patterson, but I'm certain to return and see what some other works of his are like.  I did, after all, like The Thomas Berryman Number and Along Came a Spider...