Don't Blink

Don't Blink
James Patterson
370 pgs
Little Brown and Co













Amazon Blurb -

The good
New York's Lombardo's Steak House is famous for three reasons--the menu, the clientele, and now, the gruesome murder of an infamous mob lawyer. Effortlessly, the assassin slips through the police's fingers, and his absence sparks a blaze of accusations about who ordered the hit.


The bad


Seated at a nearby table, reporter Nick Daniels is conducting a once-in-a-lifetime interview with a legendary baseball bad-boy. In the chaos, he accidentally captures a key piece of evidence that lands him in the middle of an all-out war between Italian and Russian mafia forces. NYPD captains, district attorneys, mayoral candidates, media kingpins, and one shockingly beautiful magazine editor are all pushing their own agendas--on both sides of the law.


And the dead


Back off--or die--is the clear message Nick receives as he investigates for a story of his own.Heedless, and perhaps in love with his beautiful editor, Nick endures humiliation, threats, violence, and worse in a thriller that overturns every expectation and finishes with the kind of flourish only James Patterson knows.
*******

Nick Daniels is a reporter with Citizen Magazine.  He’s in Paris, just wrapping up a treacherous escape from Dafur when his editor Courtney calls with an amazing interview op.  Disgraced superstar Yankee Pitcher Dwayne Robinson is finally granting an interview 10 yrs after being banned from baseball.  Nick just needs to get his but stateside in 24 hrs before the man chickens out.

What could possibly happen?  Well at the trendy Lombardi’s steakhouse where the interview is taking place, a mob hit can happen, that’s what.  And at the table right next to where Nick and Daniel are sitting.  Now fasten your seat belts cause the story goes wild from here.  Nick is on the mob hit list now and people around him are dropping like flies.  Never mind the fact that woman he loves is engaged to a multi millionaire who also happens to own the magazine he works for.  Oh and she is also his editor.  A slightly sticky situation since they slept together before he left for Dafur.

Nick won’t let this go, and even though the mob is trying to shut him up, he starts digging into a mess too unreal to believe.  Can he solve this before everyone who means anything to him and anyone who is helping him winds up dead?  Well, grab this book and let Patterson take you on Mr. Toads Wild Ride to find out!

I liked it, I didn't form any real attachments to any characters, though I was finding all the tragedies becoming a bit of overkill for me.  I call this Sipowicz Syndrome, for Andy Sipowicz from NYPD Blue tv show.  That poor guy had everything terrible happen to him and it gets to be way too much, thus resulting in… Sipowicz Syndrome.



3 1/2 cannolis