“Hush” by James Patterson

Okay, folks. The moment I think we’ve all been waiting for has come to an end. I am a quarter way through my January Reading list, which means I have now read my first book by James Patterson for the year 2021. For this month I had decided to read the books my father had gifted to me at Christmastime by an author whom I don’t typically enjoy the writing style of. 

My first impressions of the book prior to reading was that he is a attention whore on the front of the book. He takes all of the attention off of his co-writers and it seems to be all about him. On the inside of this book, I quickly catch onto the rhythmic format that is the chapter layout. Chapters are very short, about 1-3 pages long with the longest chapter being 6 pages in length. It’s almost as if someone in his public relations board said “hey, the span of the average reader is about seven minutes long. We have seven minutes to write something important before the reader loses interest.” Which I guess would make sense for the mass publishing industry, but this is what I think before I’ve researched anything about James Patterson’s publishing company or writing style. 

I did a little research into looking into Patterson’s history in an attempt to explain his advertising campaign, and it’s just as I expected. Patterson was a advertising executive for J. Walter Thompson until 1996 when upon retirement he became a full-time writer. This makes me understand a little bit more of his background, and it gives me a bit more respect for his advertising campaign for his book since he knows what he is doing when it comes to marketing.

This book is not the first one in the series, but it was easy to follow as just a book I happened to read on a random whim. The main character, Harriet Blue, is a rogue detective with her partner Whitt and other partner Tox. This tagalong team is asked by a county commissioner who despises them to find his missing junkie daughter and his granddaughter. This trope feels very overdone to me in the detective mystery genre. I do not like the county commissioner always being talked up as being this biggest tool and then asking the rogue cop baddies to halp him out because the bad guys have captured AB or C from him. The entire rogue cop detective thriller is overdone for me, but once again I’ll admit up to this genre not being my biggest cup of tea. 

Harriet Blue decides once she’s out of prison to continue helping her cellmate Dolly from the outside when Dolly is wrongfully accused of the murder of a beloved prison doctor, Dr. Goldman. This happens to take place the same day Harriet is being discharged from the prison, so they do not come into contact with at all. How very convenient. 

Harriet has to go live with her retired chief detective Pops because she has no place to go. Pops owns a at home gym where he trains troubled youth, and I get a whole Rocky’s mentor from this guy. Harriet’s first thing she does outside of meeting up with her old crew is get laid. One thing that is inked through this book quite heavily is the romantic partnerships of the ragtag team of main characters, which you don’t see build up much in this book. Tox is seeing a doctor whom has saved his life in one of the previous books. Whitt has a thing for Harry, and Harry is out getting dick like a champ right out of prison. 

There is a plot twist mentioned at the beginning of the book, but honestly there’s a very short list of suspects and a few automatically stand out the moment they are introduced to the audience, at least in my opinion. The build up fizzles out quite quickly with the most suspenseful part being Tox jumps off a highway bridge to save two little girls out of a car. There is a lot of running around for clues and a few suspenseful moments, but that’s just about it as far as this book goes. 

I think what makes Patterson’s books so enthralling to read are his short chapters. Having chapters so short made it easy for me to get reading done in multiple sittings since I usually like to read whole chapters in a sitting. I feel like he sums up what he’s getting across in just a single chapter here and there, so all of the other chapters came across as fillers to me. I would have appreciated a more suspenseful punch from the world’s best selling author, but in some cases I think we’re going for quantity instead of quality and I believe this goes in the case of James Patterson’s writing. 

I would question whether or not Patterson writes any of his own material at this point or if he just has a board of writers that sit down and do the dirty work for him underneath his pen name. He has been criticized many times by others within the industry considering the short span it takes for him to come up with a new book as well as his habit of reviewing his own literary fiction. How can you give an honest review of your own fiction if you were the one who supposedly wrote it?

Overall, I give this book 3/5 stars, and I’m going to say this book was a job done okay by Candice Fox, surely the unsung hero behind the computer screen. This book was impressively easy to follow despite being in the middle of the series, and I do like Harriet Blue as a character despite how generic this book was feeling to me at the start of reading. There was a few spelling errors like a misplaced ‘S’ here or there which I’m disappointed wasn’t picked up by the editing team, but I’m sure it’s more to do with the need to meet a deadline as opposed to anything really wrong within the editing process.

Rating:

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