Place a detective, a medical examiner, an assistant district attorney and a crime reporter at the same table in a restaurant and you get the ‘Women’s Murder Club’, a crime-fighting team of chicks.
Book: 10th Anniversary
Author: James Patterson & Maxine Paetro
Random House
397 pages
Rs550
Place a detective, a medical examiner, an assistant district attorney and a crime reporter at the same table in a restaurant and you get the ‘Women’s Murder Club’, a crime-fighting team of chicks.
In James Patterson’s 10th Anniversary, chick-lit meets murder mystery. You get crime-solving along with a dose of fashion: Along with Vera Wang dresses, the aisle at San Francisco detective Lindsay Boxer’s wedding is marked by yellow tape that says “Crime scene. Do not cross.”
Soon after her wedding, Lindsey is assigned to the case of a teenage girl who was found bleeding from her genitals, wearing nothing but a poncho in the rain. The girl says she’s lost her newborn baby. However, there is no sign of a missing baby. Moreover, Lindsay finds that the victim has been lying to her from the start.
Lindsay’s friend, assistant district attorney Yuki Castellano, is preparing for the most important case in her life: against a rich doctor accused of killing her husband. Yuki is confident she is prosecuting the right person, even as the defence lawyer insists he has evidence to prove that the doctor is innocent and the housekeeper is the killer. Yuki ignores his claims, but Lindsay is intrigued. The detective ignores her boss’s orders to leave Yuki’s case alone, and at the risk of upsetting her friend, Lindsay starts re-investigating.
Meanwhile, the crime reporter, Cindy Thomas, stumbles upon a story: women lose consciousness and wake up beside dumpsters near their homes with a vague memory of sex. Medical exams show that they have indeed had intercourse. But none of the victims seems to remember how or where or with whom.
Claire Washburn, the medical examiner, a “large black woman”, barely makes an appearance in the book. She’s the medical examiner on Cindy’s cases, and also Lindsey’s best friend, and the other girls’ sounding board for ideas while they investigate their respective cases.
Even while the girls are busy investigating their respective cases, they find time to catch up for a drink at Susie’s, the restaurant where they first formed the ‘Women’s Murder Club’ 10 years ago (hence the title of the book).
The narrative is a tad disorienting: Lindsay’s perspective is narrated in the first person while the rest of the book is in the third. With some chapters as short as two pages (the book has 124 chapters), it’s easy to lose track of who the narrator is.
The women are committed to their jobs. Lindsay is a tough cop who is “as subtle as a jackhammer”. Yuki, desperate for a win, approaches her case head on without allowing for the smallest margin of error. Cindy is a reporter who will go to any lengths — even at the risk of endangering her life — to get her crime story of the day.
But their hard-ass personas also have a girly side: they sometimes suffix a sentence with the endearment ‘girlfriend’ — “I’m right here, girlfriend” Lindsay says to Cindy.
Also, each crime-fighting chick has a distraction in the form of husband/boyfriend/fiancé. But then, these are trivial faults you can ignore since 10th Anniversary is about the chicks after all.
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