review: private by james patterson (and maxine paetro)

As one of the top private investigators in California, Jack Morgan and the members of his firm are often called upon by private citizens and the police to investigate crimes and civil matters. As the first book in this new James Patterson series opens, Jack is asked by a friend to investigate the murder of his friend’s wife. Jack is closely tied to both his friend (who the police suspect) and the victim (who Jack used to date) and can’t imagine who would want Shelby dead; that is until the investigation uncovers Shelby’s secret life. But that’s not Jack’s only case. His uncle, a NFL team owner, has asked him to look into score fixing for a number of games deemed suspicious. Jack and his team are also working on a serial murder case that has a twist—the victims don’t appear to have been killed by the same person. Does the killer have multiple personalities as one of the investigators suggests?

Each of the three investigations held my interest, but the serial killer was definitely the one that sucked me in especially when the motivation (which is completely off the wall, yet still imaginable) started to be revealed. Although Private follows Patterson’s typical formula, I did enjoy the way certain aspects of the story tied into each other. I further appreciated that although this is a series, Private can also be read as a standalone title.
4/5
ARC Review
Review copy provided by the publisher, Little, Brown and Company.