Just Finished Reading James Patterson's 3rd Degree

3rd Degree is the third book in James Patterson's crime/mystery series called Women's Murder Club, featuring, as you can plainly see, a number in the title of each successive novel.  Patterson wrote the first book solo, and the credit "with Andrew Gross" is listed for the second.  3rd Degree, which I just finished reading, has the writing credits going to "James Patterson and Andrew Gross".  Looking ahead at some of his later books in the series, it seems that Patterson has opted for collaboration with other writers for this project...how much of these books are his and how much are somebody else's is debatable.  I do know that this book I just read wasn't up to the level of enjoyment that I experienced reading the first two...I wonder whether Gross had anything to do with that...

In 3rd Degree, series protagonist Lindsay Boxer, a San Francisco police lieutenant in the homicide department, is up against a series of home-grown terrorist attacks that seem to signal a resurgence of leftist radical bombings and killings from those back in the 1960s and 70s.  As usual, she enlists the help of her three close friends in the informal "Women's Murder Club"...newspaper reporter Cindy Thomas, the city's medical examiner Claire Washburn, and assistant D.A. Jill Bernhardt.  Jill plays an important part in this story as she deals with spousal abuse from her husband Steve...and ultimately figures into the main story line of the terrorist attacks...

The idea of terrorism in these kinds of novels is nothing new.  However, I think that, being published in 2004 and apparently written in the year or two preceding, the book may have been meant to convey the fact that, in spite of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the ongoing Al-Qaeda threat, this country has its own legacy of terrorism and that these heinous acts were sadly relatively commonplace four or five decades ago as some violent radical organizations in America resorted to assassinations and bombings to publicize their agenda.  If that was what Patterson was trying to express here, I agree with him.  I just didn't like the way it was written all that much...and I'm not quite sure why.  I'm still sticking with the series, though, Patterson and whomever he chooses as a co-writer...