Just Finished Reading 10th Anniversary by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

James Patterson is a famous crime/mystery writer who discourages others from entering his craft, as it is extremely competitive and difficult to attain a reasonable level of financial success in it.  On the other hand, he has been very active in encouraging reading and literacy...sounds like he's a realist, albeit a self-serving one.  I've been reading through his Women's Murder Club series, each successive installment with a new number in the title, and have just completed 10th Anniversary.  Patterson has been co-writing this series with Maxine Paetro since book #4 and it looks as if their collaboration will remain for a while.  The Women's Murder Club is an informal group of long-time friends: Lindsay Boxer, a homicide investigator working for the San Francisco Police Department, Claire Washburn, a medical examiner also employed there, Cindy Thomas, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, and Yuki Castellano, an assistant district attorney.  Each has her own personal life that develops throughout the series...I won't give any details since that would be playing the "spoiler"...but I will say that a major development takes place in the life of main protagonist Lindsay...

In 10th Anniversary, Lindsay and her friends deal with three different stories that are interwoven throughout the book: a 15-year old claims to have mysteriously, at the hands of others, lost the baby she had been secretly carrying and had just given birth to, women are finding themselves waking in a drugged state, near their homes, having been sexually violated...and an eminent heart surgeon is on trial for shooting to death her philandering husband.   While I was reading how Lindsay and her colleagues investigate and solve these mysteries, I had a feeling similar to that of going to a fast food restaurant like McDonald's and eating a meal that, while enjoyable, was nevertheless completely predictable.  Patterson and Paetro churn out these books once a year and this one came out in 2011.  It shouldn't take me too long before I've caught up with them...probably sometime this year after book #16 has come out...

I'm still slowly plodding through Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos science fiction series...I probably need to pick up the pace here.  For my next book, I think I'll step up a bit from the level of John Sandford and James Patterson and try a novel of Charles Dickens that I know absolutely nothing about: Barnaby Rudge...