Just Finished Reading James Patterson's 7th Heaven

James Patterson is a writer whose works, like those of Ruth Rendell, I have belatedly begun to read.  Besides his Alex Cross crime series, he has another called The Women's Murder Club...with each successive book featuring the next number in the series.  Seeing how Sue Grafton's "Alphabet Mystery" series uses letters in its titles (like A is for Alibi and B is for Burglar), there is a definite ending to it...at "Z is for Zebra" or whatever.  But with this "numerical" series of Patterson, he could potentially go on forever.  Especially when he isn't devoting all of his time writing the books, but rather "co-writing" them with another writer, in the case of 7th Heaven...which I just finished reading...being Maxine Paetro...

The Women's Murder Club is settling down into a formula series.  Lead protagonist Lindsay Boxer, a San Francisco homicide investigator, has at least two different murder/disappearance cases per book, and there is usually a demented serial killer involved. Her three friends in the informal "club" are an assistant prosecutor, an investigative newspaper reporter, and the city chief medical examiner, each being provided subplots concerning their lives and work.  And Lindsay's personal and often frustrated romantic life fills in the narrative.  As I've mentioned before while writing about this series, the police here tend to be overly judgmental against their suspects, something I have found to be borderline disgusting.  Still, as a reader, I play the game and pull for the "good guys" to win...

7th Heaven is one of the better of the seven in this series, with one major reason being its completely unexpected ending.  Then again, I remember a Sue Grafton book ending similarly...I'll have to find out which book came out first so I can ascertain which author ripped off the other.  Lindsay is confronted with two mysteries: a string of arson murders at wealthy homes and a lead into the disappearance of a young man who had a potentially fatal heart defect.  The story went more smoothly than with the previous books in the series, and I'm looking forward to reading #8, albeit with the recognition that this is pretty escapist literature...