Just Finished Reading The 12th of Never by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

There are two kinds of fiction book series: the ones in which just about everything at the start of a volume depends entirely on what happened at the end of the previous one...you absolutely have to begin at book #1 and proceed in numerical order.   With the other type, though, each book is self-contained with its own complete story...and there are what I call "continuity" characters along with the guest characters.  These relatively continuous characters within the series include the main protagonist, but also others whose lives and relationships develop from book to book. It is this aspect of picking up a book in a series like this "out of order" that can cause a little disorientation with the reader.  The Women's Murder Club series, for most of its volumes a writing collaboration between James Patterson and Maxine Paetro, belongs to this second type of series.  So there are two different threads of narrative happening here: the crime mysteries that San Francisco homicide investigator Lindsay Boxer solves with her cohorts and friends...and these characters' continually changing personal lives.  As for the latter thread of their personal lives, I will make no comment here in my review out of respect for you, a potential reader of this series...just in case you might want to start reading it.  But the mysteries are another matter...

In The 12th of Never, which I just finished reading, there are a number of mysteries.  A middle-age professor goes to the police station with the claim that he is vividly dreaming of future murders...and they seem to be coming true!  In another case, a sleazy lawyer is on trial for murdering his wife and their young daughter and seems well on the road to conviction...that is, until an extremely complicating factor gets thrown in at the very last minute.  A star 49ers football player is under suspicion for killing the model he is engaged to marry, and then her body mysteriously disappears from the morgue.  And a convicted serial killer from an earlier story comes out of his coma and claims to have changed, now wanting to reveal the identity and location of his numerous victims.  Quite a lot of material, especially when you add all of the personal stuff that Lindsay and her "murder club" friends Claire, Yuki, and Cindy are going through in their respective personal and professional lives.  Yet Patterson and Paetro did a masterful job of weaving it all together with this, in my not-so-humble opinion, their best book so far in this series.  Good job, you two...