The bizarre ending twist fails utterly!Tom Dunleavy is a very good athlete who never quite made it to the top. After a very few minutes of near fame as a white NBA basketball player, Dunleavy bottomed out with a career ending injury and retired to a quiet life managing a very mediocre one-man law firm in New York's East Hampton, summer home to America's über-wealthy glitterati set. Dante Halleyville, an old friend of Tom's and arguably the finest young black high school basketball player in the country has been arrested for a triple murder following a pick up game of hoops against a team of all white players. The murder has celebrity, racial and drug overtones and Tom is astonished to find himself in the thick of the affair as Halleyville pleads with him to serve as lead defense attorney in a trial that promises to be front page news across the nation. Dunleavy, intuitively recognizing Halleyville's innocence but sensibly realizing he will be way over his head during this trial, pleads with Kate Costello, an old girl friend and rising star in one of America's upper crust law firms, to join him as co-counsel for the defense.
"Beach Road" is no exception to Patterson's now easily recognizable style of writing short, snappy two to three page chapters that keeps things moving along at a rapid fire pace. But he's introduced a very interesting and quite effective twist - entitling each chapter with only a character's name and writing those few pages from the viewpoint of that particular character. That makes for some very novel fast-paced changes in perspective. But, sadly, this particular style rests for its success strictly on dialogue and action leaving absolutely no margin for error in plot development because it also leaves absolutely no room for the redeeming features of narrative description, atmosphere and character development.
"Beach Road" succeeds admirably and is a lightweight, enjoyable and quite compelling page-turner until the eagerly anticipated and much vaunted twist that the dust jacket exclaims will leave readers gasping in shock. Like a downhill mountain-biker who jams on the front brakes, "Beach Road" vaults up over the handle bars and lands flat on its face! Weak, weak, weak ... the twist is certainly an unpredictable surprise but it is so bizarrely unrealistic and utterly off the wall as to completely derail what was looking to be a pretty darn good book. Thankfully, the twist occurs very close to the end of the book so the disappointment lasts for only a very few pages. That means a summer beach or hammock reader can still derive a little enjoyment from the book and not feel they wasted hours upon hours of their time.
Recommended for die-hard Patterson fans! If you've never read Patterson before, you'd better not be starting here.
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