Just Finished Reading James Patterson's The 5th Horseman

The 5th Horseman, the obviously fifth book in James Patterson's Women's Murder Club crime series, is really a collaboration between Maxine Paetro and him.  I have nothing in particular against collaborative literary efforts other than that an inferior product might be masked with a more famous writer's name attached to it...although another may have done the lion's share of work.  With The 5th Horseman, I cannot tell how much of it is Patterson's and how much Paetro's, but I can tell you this much: I was disappointed in it, especially in comparison to the previous book in the series I read.  There are a couple of reasons for this...

The driving theme in The 5th Horseman is that a series of suspicious deaths have been occurring in a recently-privatized San Francisco hospital, and the victims...none of whom were thought to be in any serious danger...are found with the same peculiar type of buttons resting on their eyes.  San Francisco police lieutenant Lindsay Boxer, the series protagonist, meanwhile finds herself investigating a different series of murders in which young women are found dead, prominently displayed in public all dressed up and sitting in fancy cars.  All of this takes place in the midst of a big lawsuit trial, pitting relatives of people who died under mysterious circumstances in that aforementioned hospital against its administrators.  I kept thinking that, at some point in the story, the various threads would start coming together into a cohesive picture.  Instead, the author(s) kept them separate and didn't even resolve the main story line until late in the book's epilogue...and without the participation of main character Boxer.   And I also felt that the killings always present in this genre of fiction, as bad as they can sometimes get, went way over the line in this tale...especially with regard to little children...

So, no, I didn't care for The 5th Horseman.  It seemed to be a rushed effort, a publisher's assembly line piece designed to capitalize on the all-to-real fear that many people experience when having to undergo a hospital stay.  It sure didn't help with my own phobias in this area...