Yesterday I read The 6th Target by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro.  I’ve never read a James Patterson before but I received this one in my Christmas stocking so I thought I’d give it a go.  It was a thrilling ride, as much fun as an afternoon spent at a water park (I love water park rides) and as enriching as eating a bag of candy corn (again, I love candy corn).  The point I’m trying to make is that The 6th Target was an easy and entertaining read and that I will never think about a single issue raised in the book (were there any?) ever again.  It was a vacation for the brain and once in a awhile, we all need to veg out.

The book is formulaic and assistant writer Maxine Paetro does a good job keeping to the program: fast and engaging chapters, sketched-in characters, good locale markers (San Francisco), creepy crimes, and short love scenes.  We hop from scene to scene, crime to crime, and the occasional breaks for lovemaking or love bemoaning give us time to take a breath.  Like I said, the book is like  a water park ride, thrilling ups and downs, and the lulls when we are bumping along waiting for action are short indeed.

As formulaic as it is, the book is still good because we are drawn in immediately and we care about what is going to happen right to the end.  Will the creepy guy get what’s coming to him?  Is he faking his madness?  And why the hell is someone in Cindy’s apartment building killing all the little doggies?  We want to know and we read to the end to find out.  No, we don’t care if Lindsey ends up with Joe or not; that is a side distraction and frankly I was on the side of Lindsey’s sexually stirred-up partner but I won’t give anything away, not even the question of who ends up sleeping with whom.