Book #34 for 2022: 21st Birthday by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro
21st Birthday by James Patterson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a book that I picked up because it sounded interesting, not realising that it was the 21st book in a series, but it feels like one of those book series that you can dip into at any point.
It's based around the "women's murder club", and has four central characters: Lindsay Boxer, a detective, who narrates several of the chapters, Clare Washburn, a medical examiner, Cindy Thomas, a journalist, and Yuki Castellano, a lawyer.
So, in this book, a young woman has gone missing shortly before her 21st birthday, along with her young daughter. All the evidence points towards her husband, who is said to be abusive, and a number of murder victims show up during the first half of the book. However, the question is, have they got the right suspect?
The second half of the book turns into a courtroom drama, and without giving too much away, usually in fiction if someone seems like an obvious suspect, it means that they are innocent.
I was constantly playing armchair detective, and had several theories as to how things would play out. I was constantly looking for where the writers might have been trying to throw in a few red herrings.
It turned out that most of my theories were wrong, and after being a little surprised, I realised that it didn't matter, and I started to understand that the book was making a different point about the idea of injustice, as well as being a novel involving toxic masculinity. I found this book to be easy to read, and the main characters very likeable, and they definitely stopped the novel from feeling too bleak, despite the subject matter. The ending certainly felt more uplifting than it should have been, and I may well check out some of the earlier titles in this series.
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