Review: The 18th Abduction

The 18th Abduction by James Patterson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In perhaps the greatest time span of any Women's Murder Club novel, we get a story bookended by a prologue and epilogue set five years after the main action - and with Lindsay Boxer maintaining some uncharacteristic (for this series) narrative distance by often invoking that five-year gap. But like a lot of other recent novels in this series, it deals in very resonant ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter, and dials the suspense and even horror factors up pretty high as you can expect. In this case, we get Lindsay and Joe learning that a Serbian war criminal has come to America and is living in San Francisco - and still committing brutalities against local women, just because he thinks he can get away with it. It reminds me of a recent story about an old military leader from...I can't remember the country, maybe it was Haiti, but there was an old despot like that found hiding out in Virginia and working as an Uber driver until someone from the old country recognized him and turned him in to the authorities? Something like that. Perhaps that inspired some of the directions that Patterson and Paetro took in this book, though it leads up to a very different kind of ending - one that has to be seen to be believed, a heart-pounding epilogue right up to the very, very last page.

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