Patterson, Richard North Books

Exile

Richard North Patterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 83 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Patterson Scores Again 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The Exile lures you into its story slowly but surely and then explodes you forward into a sun storm of character and drama. The best novels are those which keep you turning page after page while thinking, "... what would I do?...". You find yourself shutting the book and just thinking for awhile and then not being able to walk away, opening it back up and plunging in again. This is that type of novel. Here a decent man with an old secret love finds himself sinking toward giving up all he holds dear to save that person who may be a terrorist. A new love must fall into question. A career must fall away. All is sacrificed upon the altar of truth. It's a great book and will capture your mind and heart. Be prepared to be held captive while you almost become "the exile".

Editorial Review:

David Wolfe is a successful American lawyer being primed for a run for Congress. But when the phone rings and he hears the voice of Hana Arif—the Palestinian woman with whom he had a secret affair in law school—he begins a completely unexpected journey.

The next day, the prime minister of Israel is assassinated by a suicide bomber while visiting San Francisco. Soon, Hana is accused of being the mastermind behind the murder. Now David faces an agonizing choice: Will he, a Jew, represent her?

The most challenging case of David’s career requires that he delve deep into the lives of Hana and her militant Palestinian husband, all the way back to Israel and the West Bank. There he uncovers the couple’s dangerous connections…culminating in an explosive trial where the stakes are Hana’s life—and the future of two peoples.

Silent Witness

Richard North Patterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 128 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In each successive novel since Degree of Guilt, Richard North Patterson has experimented with flashbacks and past tragedies to drive the present suspense of his legal thrillers. Silent Witness is, perhaps, his greatest achievement with the technique as his hero, Tony Lord, is haunted by the 27-year-old murder of his high school girlfriend, Alison Taylor.

In the late 1960s, Tony is the star of the Lake City, Ohio, high school football team. But when Alison is found strangled behind her house, even Tony's closest friend, Sam Robb, suspects him. Alison's true killer is never found, and Tony flees his home town to forge a career as a high-powered, high-profile San Francisco criminal attorney and marries a a movie star. Cutting to the present day, Tony is called back to Lake City to defend his old friend. Sixteen-year-old track star Marcie Calder was found dead on the shore of Lake Erie, and Sam, now the overweight assistant principal and track coach of Lake City High, is the accused. A series of scandals slowly erodes Tony's confidence in Sam's innocence as Tony comes to terms with his own troubled past.

As with Patterson's previous work, Silent Witness is a novel with subtle characters who happen to be involved in a compelling (and authentic-seeming) criminal trial. For dedicated Patterson fans, some insight into the life of actress Stacey Tarrant is a special treat. She's Tony's wife in the present world of the novel but was the lover of Senator James Kilcannon before the senator was assassinated. James was the brother of Kerry Kilcannon, the enigmatic presidential candidate at the center of Patterson's 1998 blockbuster, No Safe Place. --Patrick O'Kelley

Degree of Guilt

Richard North Patterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The core of Richard North Patterson's legal thrillers is characterization, and Degree of Guilt, the novel that relaunched his career in 1993, features two captivating individuals: Christopher Paget and Mary Carelli. Paget, the upstart hero of Patterson's 1979 Edgar-winning The Lasko Tangent, is now a sophisticated trial lawyer doing his best to raise a teenage son in San Francisco. He's a man to be admired: famous for bringing down the president in a financial scandal, he has settled into the comfortable life of a successful attorney. His life is transformed, however, when his former lover (and mother of his son), Mary Carelli, pays a visit.

The novel begins in a San Francisco hotel room as Mary, now an NBC journalist, surveys the torn landscape of author Mark Ransom's apartment. Ransom is, or was, America's most eminent writer. As she tells the police, Ransom had uncovered new recorded evidence of an affair between a long-dead starlet and a now-sainted senator (shades of Marilyn Monroe and JFK). While Ransom and Mary were listening to the tapes, she claims, he tried to rape her and she killed him in self-defense. Mary turns to Paget to defend her in what becomes a complex case of missing and conflicting evidence. Old emotions are stirred between the two just as Paget begins to doubt Mary's innocence.

The suspense of Degree of Guilt is grounded in the twists and turns of the trial at the novel's center, but just as compelling is the emerging history of Mary and Paget, and Paget's struggles to keep his son out of the media frenzy surrounding his mother's case. As well, Patterson addresses the deeper ethical questions that face many lawyers as they decide which cases to take and which evidence to use. Capturing archetypal characters and situations, Degree of Guilt becomes a parable of American law. --Patrick O'Kelley

Caroline Masters

Richard North Patterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

A Not-Quite-Final Judgement 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 14 people found this review helpful.

I am grateful to the other reviewers who clued me in to Carolyn Masters being a reissue of Final Judgement. I, too, almost bought it without realizing. Patterson's books (along with Turow, Grishom, et al)are some of my favorite rainy-day reads, and I hate to see his reputation tarnished by a tawdry publisher's trick. Final Judgement is a wonderful book, almost prescient, considering what the Bushies just did to women's right to choose. Read it (under either title, I guess).

Editorial Review:

Long estranged from her blue-blooded New England family, attorney Caroline Masters is summoned home to defend her niece against charges of murder. Police found twenty-two-year-old Brett Allen blood-splattered and incoherent near the scene of the crime, the weapon covered with her fingerprints.

Caroline has doubts of her own about Brett's innocence. But as the sensational trial heats up, she'll find disturbing inconsistencies in the testimony of the prosecution's star witness and find herself facing some of the challenges of her life and career--from trusting her former lover, state prosecutor Jackson Watts, to risking the federal judgeship she's worked her whole life for, to exposing a dark family secret that could save her niece or destroy them both.

Protect and Defend

Richard North Patterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 138 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Richard North Patterson, whose legal thrillers have won him legions of devoted mystery fans, shows off his superb pacing and narrative gifts as well as his ability to create vividly realized characters in this compelling novel of late-term abortion, parental consent, and the battle over a nominee for chief justice of the Supreme Court. Unlike Patterson's typical courtroom dramas, the name of this game isn't murder; it's the body politic that's bleeding. When newly elected Democratic president Kerry Kilcannon nominates appeals court judge Caroline Masters to the top spot on the court, he knows he'll have a fight on his hands. Leading the opposition is his political rival, MacDonald Gage, the GOP majority leader who owes his soul and career to the Christian right wing. They're suspicious of Masters even before a politically charged case involving a teenager whose parents refuse to allow her to terminate a disastrous pregnancy ends up in her court. More principled than Gage, but equally adamant, is Republican senator Chad Palmer, who, like Masters, harbors his own potentially career-destroying secret.

Masters is an intriguing character, a woman whose judicial integrity, personal privacy, and political ambitions collide when she casts a tie-breaking vote on the constitutionality of the recently enacted Protection of Life bill. Not only young Mary Anne Tierney's future is at stake: so are the reproductive rights of all women, the resilience of the judicial system, and the personal lives of innocent bystanders who will be sacrificed on the altar of the First Amendment--the public's right to know, and the media's right to tell. Moving swiftly between the courts of public opinion and the federal judiciary, from San Francisco to the nation's capital, Patterson tells a mesmerizing story that's been praised by political and legal luminaries such as Mario Cuomo, Barbara Boxer, and Alan Dershowitz. But don't let that stop you. This up-to-date version of Advise and Consent is a provocative read that will resonate with political junkies as well as those who've made bestsellers out of Patterson's more typical genre thrillers. --Jane Adams

Balance of Power

Richard North Patterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 85 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

An Admirable Effort at an Intractable Subject 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This is an insider's account of politics in Washington, with the most realistic dialogue and scenes I've ever encountered in a novel. Not a thriller, but an easy read that kept me intrigued and turning the pages (nearly 800 of them!).

Author Patterson deserves a lot of credit for writing a novel so well researched that he never has to fall back on artistic license to keep the plot moving; that is, there are no "yeah, sure" moments (John Grisham, take note!). He has a detailed knowledge of law that he effortlessly weaves into the plot while making it edifying and interesting for the reader.

Those frustrated with the slow pace of reform in Washington will come away with an understanding of all the forces at play in making legislation. What's best for the nation may ignite the process but soon gets lost amidst the requisite trade-offs, payoffs and paybacks (and, when there's much at stake, sabotage). Money rules, and until we reform the way we finance campaigns, special interests will continue to trump good policy.

The next time you catch yourself scratching your head trying to explain to a foreigner (or your child) why we stand by and allow children and other innocents to be slaughtered regularly, don't even bother, just direct them to this book.

I'm giving him an extra star for conscientiousness and integrity; this is a quality output on a matter of life and...deaths, an obscene surfeit of them. If you're interested in the "hard underbelly" of the gun control debate and other Washington problems that don't even get addressed much less solved, you'll be a better citizen for reading it.

Editorial Review:

An epic story that moves with force, passion, and authority, Balance of Power begins when President Kerry Kilcannon and television journalist Lara Costello at last decide to marry. But the momentous occasion is followed by an unspeakable tragedy—a massacre of innocents by gunfire—that ignites a high-stakes game of politics and legal maneuvering in the Senate, the courtroom, and across the country, which the charismatic but untested young President is determined to win at any cost. But in the incendiary clash over gun violence and gun rights, the cost to both Kilcannons may be even higher than he imagined.

The Outside Man

Richard North Patterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Couldn't finish it... 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I read "Silent Witness" and really lived it. I saw this book for sale and figured I'd give it a try. Poor move.
The book was hard to follow. There were so many flashbacks I had a hard time figuring out where I was (not the plot - the actual place the characters were). I forced myself to keep reading, hoping that it would improve. It didn't. I put the book down about 20 pages from the end.

Editorial Review:

The outside man is society lawyer Adam Shaw. A northerner in a southern town jealous of its secrets, he finds the dead body of his best friend's wealthy wife -- and his friend is missing.
In a world where wealthy people will stop at nothing to maintain a genteel image, Shaw must gamble his career, his marriage, and his very life in a passionate quest for the real murderer -- and learn the shocking truth about his own past and future . . . .
"A classic detective story." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Rich, complex, beautifully written." -- The New Republic
"Richard North Patterson seems destined for celebrity status, alongside Scott Turow and John Grisham, as an acknowledged master." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

Private Screening

Richard North Patterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

TV OR NOT TV 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This early novel by Patterson is far inferior to his later works, but I think it stands on its own in kind of a predatory or sadistic way. The whole concept of hostages being negotiated and aired as a t.v. special is all too frighteningly real, considering the nation's obsession with so-called reality television. But the premise is intriguing, and the story has some tense and riveting scenes. My main complaint is that within the novel, John Damone tells Stacy that "the man I hired killed him. Lord just brought it up again.." So i figured Stacy was in on it, but obviously she wasn't. This little confusing issue kind of squelched my overall enthusiasm for the novel, but even then Patterson was writing awesomely, giving us a glimpse of what he's come to do best---trial novels!
RECOMMENDED.

Editorial Review:

"Thrilling.... PRIVATE SCREENING succeeds on all counts. It's a footrace of a read, daring you to put it down."
ATLANTA JOURNAL & CONSTITUTION
The nation is stunned silent when presidential hopeful James Kilcannon is shot dead in front of his rock-star girlfriend Stacy Tarrant. Fiercely independent attorney Tony Lord dares to defend the shooter, but the already bizarre plot takes another twist. As America watches, a mysterious and ruthless figure, known only as Phoenix, takes to the airwaves-- and takes the wife of a wealthy newspaper mogul and Stacy's manager as his hostages. Phoenix mounts a televised trial of his own--in which Stacy Tarrant and Tony Lord are helpless defendents, millions of viewers are jurors, and--unless his chilling demands are met--Pheonix is the unstoppable executioner....

The Lasko Tangent

Richard North Patterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

CRISP BUT NOT TOTALLY SATISFYING 3 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This is Patterson's first book, and in his introduction he offers an explanation for its inception. Christopher Paget appears in two later novels, "Degree of Guilt" and "Eyes of a Child" which are far superior novels than this one. Be warned, though---if you read "Degree of Guilt" first you'll pretty much know what happens in this book. Paget is a little overbearing and cynical in this one and not as likeable in his mature years. The pace is pretty effective, and the villains are appropriately nasty. I found the ending a tad bit too brisk; it just seemed to end.
RECOMMENDED IN ORDER TO ENJOY THE BETTER SEQUELS.

Editorial Review:

"Mr. Patterson is a natural storyteller....Fast moving...A handsome job."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
William Lasko is a self-made millionaire who's got an eye for wealth and influence, the ear of the president, and a talent for using both to get what he wants. Now the Economic Crimes Commission wants the corrupt, untouchable Lasko brought down--and U.S. Attorney Christopher Paget is tapped to take on the job.
To gather enough evidence to nail Lasko without alienating the White House, Paget's got to go by the book. But Lasko makes his own rules. And eliminating enemies is William Lasko's golden one....

Escape the Night

Richard North Patterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

A chore to plod thru. 2 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

I have enjoyed RNP's legal thrillers and looked forward to this one. However, my disappointment matches that of the other reviewers.

I had to assign myself fifty pages a day to complete this one. In a word it was a task. Confusing, way too dark, no sympathetic characters, boring and tedious.

Mr. Patterson is capable of much better, so I kept reading hoping for the enjoyment to begin...it never happened for me. I was just relieved to finish.

Someone once told me that "life is too short for a bad book." I think he had this book in mind.

Editorial Review:

"Intricate . . . Intelligent and menacing." The Boston Globe
By the bestselling author of "Degree of Guilt," an inescapable tale of suspense, scandal, and shock too terrifying to put aside as it draws you into its vortex of unforgettable characters and shattering events.
Peter Carey is the son of privilege -- and an heir to terror. Poised on the brink of power over a mighty family dynasty, he is also the victim of a recurring nightmare that suddenly becomes all too real. The twisted force that had claimed his parents many years before now stalks him too. But the key to his survival lies locked deep in Peter's own mind. And he must discover it before the final night closes in. . .